Ethiopian Airlines (ET, Addis Ababa International) and flydubai (FZ, Dubai International) have complied with an ultimatum from the Somali Civil Aviation Authority (SCAA) to declare Hargeisa, the capital of breakaway Somaliland, as part of Somalia.
The regulator had threatened to withdraw the two airlines’ access to its airspace by August 24 unless they changed the way Hargeisa was displayed on their respective internet booking engines. Ethiopian Airlines had shown Hargeisa without the country’s name, while flydubai described it as being in Somaliland.
Ethiopian Airlines tried to negotiate a longer deadline for the change, but the SCAA refused in a letter seen by ch-aviation, saying that “given the available technological capabilities, we expect that the necessary corrections should not take more than two days.”
The Ethiopian airline serves Mogadishu in Somalia, as well as Garowe and Bosaso in the autonomous but non-breakaway Puntland. Flydubai, on the other hand, does not operate any other routes to Somalia, but traverses its airspace on the way to some of its African destinations.
Other foreign airlines that fly scheduled flights to Hargeisa, such as Daallo Airlines, Jubba Airways (Kenya), African Express Airways and Air Djibouti, either list Hargeisa as a Somali city or do not display country names next to their destinations.
Somaliland, once an Italian colony that voluntarily joined former British Somalia in 1960, de facto seceded in the early 1990s. While it is fully autonomous and has control over the airspace it claims, under international law it remains part of Somalia and subject to its authority, including with regard to its airspace.
