Troubles Tarnish a Once-Shining African Airline

Only months after France's African colonies gained their independence in 1960, they sounded a clarion call to African sovereignty and unity: they would pool their meager resources and create an airline of their own.

Colonialism had left behind air routes, roads and navigable rivers used not to ferry people from one corner of Africa to another but mainly to convey natural resources from the continent's interior to its coastal ports — and then to Paris or London or Brussels. So just as a phone call from one ex-African colony to another might have to go through a switchboard in Paris, travel in Africa was always circuitous. An African airline would change all that.

And so on June 26, 1961, Air Afrique was born — an experiment that would mirror the continent's ups and downs over the next four decades, from post-independence euphoria to post-cold-war torpor.

"To me, Air Afrique was the biggest and best company when I was a boy," said Marcel Gabou, an Ivoirian who has been a commercial pilot for 14 years and at Air Afrique since 1997. "I would go to the airport just to watch the planes take off or taxi. It impressed me and I decided I'd work for this company. It was the dream company for every young African who wanted to become a pilot."

"But now," he added, "the image of Air Afrique has been tarnished."

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/20/world/20AFRI.html