Sandstorm diverts Kuwait flights to KSA

Seven flights due to land at Kuwait International Airport on Tuesday were diverted to Saudi Arabia and Bahrain as a result of sandstorms, it was reported. According to the Kuwait Times, poor weather conditions caused a malfunction in the airport’s instrument landing system (ILS), meaning the unidentified services had to be re-rerouted to King Fahd International Airport in Dammam and Bahrain International Airport. An ILS is used to assist flights in landing when weather causes poor visibility. “Aviation traffic for arriving planes stopped completely for almost two hours during the sandstorms, which caused the ILS to go out of order”, an anonymous source at Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) told the paper. Kuwait International Airport has suffered a number of problems of late. In March, a Lufthansa flight arriving from Frankfurt was left stranded in the air before being  forced to divert to Damman in Saudi Arabia after the airport’s navigation systems failed. Days later, unionists and MPs in the oil-rich Gulf state called for an inquiry into the airport’s ageing technology infrastructure, some of which is said to be more than a quarter of a century old. “We have been expecting a tragic aviation accident to take place,” said Rajab Al-Refaei, head of the labour union at the DGCA, quoted in the Kuwait Times.