Are You Waiting for Somalia Airshow?

Pirates command its coast. Traffic along the country's few pockmarked roads is often disrupted by militias and criminals. Of more than 22,000 km of roadway, only 2,608 km are paved.

And though Somalia's war-torn capital city, Mogadishu, has made small security improvements since the terrorist group al Shabaab was forced out about two years ago, anarchy still reigns. One of the organization's operatives managed to slam a bomb-packed vehicle into a peacekeeping convoy there on Friday, reportedly killing eight civilians. Al Shabaab claimed another life earlier last week, when it detonated an explosive in the city's marketplace. 

But in the country's skies, high above a landscape torn by civil war, business is running more smoothly. According to the New York Times magazine, the Nairobi-headquartered Jubba Airways, "the unofficial national carrier of Somalia," is aggressively growing its fleet of leased Soviet Antonov propeller planes and old Boeing jets, and expanding its domestic and international flight routes. 

The airline serves Somali business people with interests abroad and an increasing number of Somali expatriates lured back on the premise of declining volatility. "Road insecurity is bad for Somalia, but it's good for airlines," Abirahman Aden Ibrahim, a former deputy prime minister, told the Times. Jubba's managing director Abdullahi Warsame, who left his native country 25 years ago, flies from his home in Dubai to Mogadishu monthly.

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