BEING A KM3 AIRPORT WORKER

MBABANE  – At least 93 staffers of the Swaziland Civil Aviation Authority (SWACAA) deployed to the new King Mswati III International Airport report for work every day, even though there is not much activity.
They report for work at 7am and stay there until knock-off time at 4pm each day.

However, Solomon Dube, Director of the government wing, says these workers are not idle.
According to him, they work in 10 departments, which include the Fire Control, Air Traffic Control, Front Desk, Civil Works, Control Tower and groundworks, among others.
Going to the airport during daytime and finding the staff members doing little work in their various departments, one could ill perceive that these people have loafed to the bank for their salaries for the past two months since the opening of the airport.

Dube, instead, said they were very busy, earning their money through hard work. He said even though there were no planes landing at the world class airport, there was a lot of work to be done.
He revealed that among this was the clearing of debris from the runway.

The director believes this is an important task because the airport should always be ready to facilitate the landing of airlines at any given time of the day.
When pressed further on what the employees of SWACAA really did at the airport, he maintained that they were also deployed there to satisfy requirements of the airport’s licence.
He said the stringent requirements included among other things, that a full staff complement should be available in the facility at any time during operation hours.

Dube said this was a requirement necessitated by the fact that, since the airport was now open, planes from all over the world could land at any time.
“The plane that operates from the Matsapha International Airport, for example, lands at 8am and leaves at about 9am. This does not necessarily mean that when the plane leaves, people should go home and come back when it makes another return trip to the facility,” he said.

He said, therefore, since the airport was licensed to operate, it should have all the required staffing present during operating hours.
The 93 people working under SWACAA at the airport, previously known as Sikhuphe, exclude police and immigration officers based at the same airport.
An attempt to visit the airport was made a few weeks ago to investigate what the actual activity was, in terms of the people who work there.

The entrance to the facility was guarded by police officers and private security guards. This security detail told reporters that the airport was closed to the public and the scribes were duly turned away from the gate.
In a previous interview, Dube disclosed to this newspaper that members of the public were not allowed inside the facility because it was not a museum or a tourist’s destination.
He had said his department had received and turned down a number of requests from schools and tour companies to visit the airport.

“We were mandated to keep the facility in sublime condition and, therefore, allowing too many people to step on the floor tiles could mean we are allowing them to be messed up. In no time, we would be forced to re-tile the facility,” he said.
On another note, Dube said the airport had no international airline that had shown or registered concrete interest to utilise the facility.
He said the department was waiting for Swaziland Airlink to move to the airport from the Matsapha International Airport.

Previously, he had said Swaziland signed Bilateral Air Service Agreements with 10 countries.
Through the defunct Royal Swazi National Airways (RSNA), the signed agreements provided a platform for possible Swazi planes to fly to destinations such as the United Arab Emirates, Kenya, Ethiopia, Zambia, Rwanda, South Africa, Namibia, Tanzania, Uganda and Botswana, among others.

The KM3 International Airport was opened by His Majesty King Mswati III on March 7, 2014, during a glittering ceremony that attracted scores of people.
The airport was designed with a runway to accommodate even the world’s largest plane, an Airbus A380.
Government forecasts an annual passenger turnover of 250 000 to 300 000 for the new facility, an almost fivefold increase in the numbers passing through the existing airport in Matsapha. The airport is located in a remote location, more than 80 kilometres east of Mbabane, the capital city.

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