It is no secret that Africa presents the most daunting challenge in the world to aviation safety; accident rates continue to reflect that reality. However, over the past decade, there has been a new stabilizing force in the region.
To most aviation professionals, the operating environment faced by the World Food Programme (WFP) and its partner agencies of the United Nations Humanitarian Air Service (UNHAS) is as alien as another planet. All of the terms are familiar, but nearly everything else about WFP operations is … different, sometimes startling so.
The entity bringing order and an elevated level of safety to these operations on the frontiers of aviation is the WFP’s Aviation Safety Unit (ASU), headquartered in Rome but with regional offices in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates; Nairobi, Kenya; and Johannesburg, South Africa. Through a series of audits, regulator reviews, training and oversight of its own operations, the WFP has set a new standard for operations in underdevel…
