Dakar-Leopold Sedar Senghor Airport

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Dakar-Leopold Sedar Senghor Airport
PhareMamelles6.JPG
Characteristics
ICAO code GOOY
IATA code DKR
Coordinates

14 ° 44 '23 "  N , 17 ° 29' 25"  W Coordinates: 14 ° 44 '23 "  N , 17 ° 29' 25"  W.

Height above MSL 26 m (85  ft )
Transport links
Distance from the city center 11 km west of Dakar
Basic data
operator civil / military
Passengers 1,394,351 (2004)
Runways
03/21 1500 m × 30 m asphalt
18/36 3490 m × 45 m asphalt

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The airfield Dakar is a civil and military used airport in the district of Yoff from Dakar , Senegal .

Until December 7, 2017 it was the international airport of Dakar, the capital of the country on the Cap-Vert peninsula, as Aéroport international Léopold-Sédar-Senghor ( French , English Léopold Sédar Senghor International Airport ) . The airport was the most important in Senegal and was served by planes up to the size of the Boeing 747 .

In 2004, 1,394,351 passengers were handled.

history

The former Ouakam airfield had been of great importance since the first third of the 20th century, because in the 1920s and 1930s planes traveling from Europe to South America had to stop over for refueling, which often happened in Dakar. However, the base used for military and civil aviation soon proved to be insufficient. Air France, Lufthansa, Ala Litoria, Imperial Airways and British Airways made regular stopovers there as early as 1937.

During the Second World War, French engineers were looking for a place for a larger airport in 1941. They finally chose the Yoff Plain , directly north of the Ouakam base. In June 1944, the Dakar-Yoff airport went into operation and the Ouakam base was used until 1946.

Air France's first commercial flight with the Concorde supersonic airliner , which ran from Paris to Rio de Janeiro in 1976 , also had a stopover in Dakar. Until September 1987, Dakar Airport was a possible emergency landing site for the space shuttle if the take-off was aborted.

It was one of the five main hubs of the multinational airline Air Afrique, which was dissolved in 2002 . The airport was named in 1996 after the famous writer and former Senegalese President Léopold Sédar Senghor . Previously it was called Aéroport International de Dakar Yoff , after the municipality in the north of Dakar.

There used to be direct flights to the airport from German-speaking countries, for example Lufthansa, Swissair, German Cargo, Lufthansa Cargo, Condor and Hapag-Lloyd. There were also connections with Air France from Paris, with Brussels Airlines from Brussels, with Iberia from Madrid and with TAP from Lisbon. Delta Air Lines launched a route between Atlanta and Johannesburg , South Africa , in December 2006 with a stopover in Dakar.

Since the existing airport did not meet the demands of increasing passenger numbers and freight rates in the long term, the new international airport Aéroport international Blaise Diagne was built 45 km east of Dakar, in the Thiès near Diass ( Ndiass ) region since 2007 . This was opened on December 7, 2017.

Incidents

  • On June 25, 1953, a De Havilland Comet 1A of the Union Aéromaritime de Transport (UAT) (registration F-BGSC ) coming from Paris rolled over the end of the runway when landing at Dakar-Yoff airport. She crossed a drainage ditch, which led to the loss of her landing gear, and remained lying on the fuselage around 40 meters behind the end of the runway. All ten passengers and seven crew members survived. The machine was only eight weeks old and was irreparably damaged.

Individual evidence

  1. Le Monde : Le Sénégal espère que son nouvel aéroport deviendra le hub aérien d'Afrique de l'Ouest (French, from 7 December 2017)
  2. Moussa KEBE 2009: Historique de l'aeroport de Dakar Ouakam see page 24 of the PDF file 1.75 MB
  3. Space Shuttle Transoceanic Abort Landing (TAL) Sites: Banjul, The Gambia ( Memento of October 29, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
  4. ^ Accident report G-AHEZ, Aviation Safety Network (English) , accessed on January 21, 2016.
  5. ^ Accident report Comet 1A F-BGSC , Aviation Safety Network (English), accessed on August 18, 2017.
  6. ^ Accident report F-BHBC, Aviation Safety Network (English) , accessed on January 21, 2016.

Web links