By Samwel Kumba and Justus Ondari
Seeing him seated in his spacious office along North Airport Road, Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA), one would be forgiven for assuming that Captain Musa Bulhan has had it easy in life. For Capt. Musa, the proprietor and chief executive of African Express Airways, is the first African to own an airline with landing rights in Europe.
Besides, the 59 year-old was among the first Kenyans to acquire the highest pilot qualifications- an airline transport pilot license-in 1974. But behind the ‘firsts and accolades’, Capt. Musa’s life is one hit by tragedy at a tender age and littered by internecine ‘wars’ thrown at him by both nature and man. Robbed of parental love, first by the death of his mother when he was a toddler, and then his father at 15, the decorated career pilot was forced to start fending for himself literally before he was out of the diapers.
Four years down the line, at an age when most of his playmates probably still believed that their fathers were the strongest people on earth, a gangling of a boy with intelligence beyond his age made a startling career choice- to become a pilot. Unbeknown to him, the knack to survive was to be implanted in the young Musa right from the very day he decided to be a pilot. Many of the industry players he approached dismissed him as a joker.
“Many tried to frighten and discourage me from the profession but everything they threw at me made me even more enthusiastic. They would instruct me to wake up at 4.00 am and check the oil or tyres of an aircraft. They would give me tests on all sorts of jargon which I could not understand. Then they would call me names. If I were fainthearted and uninterested in the training, I would have dropped out. I survived the ordeal,” reminisces the captain. However, not all people were bad and many, including the government which gave him a scholarship, came to his rescue when the going got tough.
“In fact, I did not have much of a problem because I got a lot of help.”
Musa was to undergo training in the United Kingdom and later in the United States after joining the defunct East African Airways. When it collapsed with the collapse of the then East African Community (EAC) in 1977, Kenya Airways (KQ) was formed. Obviously, there were too many pilots for the few airplanes the then nascent KQ had. “I felt it was high time for someone to give room. Unfortunately, I would not tell anyone else to get out. I told myself to give room with my meager Ksh 270,000 benefits,”
Aviation business
It was then that Capt. Musa decided to set up an airline. He floated the idea to the then ministry of Power and Communication but the ministry officials felt it could not work. Thinking they were getting rid of him, they gave him a temporary operating permit for him to set up the famous Pioneer Airlines at Wilson Airport in 1978.
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