A 2024 survey found 41 buildings around Wilson Airport violating aviation safety rules. Not one has been demolished. Now, instead of enforcing the law, the government wants to redirect flight paths towards Nairobi National Park. Senators are alarmed. COFEK demands answers.
Nairobi, Kenya | 27 June 2026
A proposal now before Parliament has raised one of the most serious aviation safety questions in Kenya’s recent history.
The government wants to alter the flight path into Wilson Airport — redirecting aircraft towards Nairobi National Park — rather than demolish dozens of buildings that have been constructed illegally in the airport’s protected airspace.
The revelation has ignited a fierce debate in the Senate and drawn the condemnation of consumer rights advocates, who say the proposal rewards lawbreakers and endangers Kenyan lives.
Wilson Airport is not an obscure strip of tarmac at the edge of the city. It is East Africa’s busiest domestic airport. Every day, it handles scheduled domestic flights, air ambulance operations, pilot training missions, and tourism charters to Kenya’s national parks and neighbouring countries.
The safety of every aircraft that takes off and lands there depends, in part, on the integrity of the airspace surrounding it.
That airspace, it now emerges, has been systematically compromised — and nobody with the authority to act has acted.
Forty-One Buildings. Zero Demolitions.
Documents tabled before the Senate Standing Committee on Roads, Transportation and Housing tell a damning story.
A survey conducted in 2024 identified 41 buildings within a six-kilometre radius of Wilson Airport that either exceed the Obstacle Limitation Surface — the legally protected safety envelope around the airport — or lack the mandatory Kenya Civil Aviation Authority (KCAA) obstruction clearance that every tall structure in the vicinity is required to obtain.
The Obstacle Limitation Surface is not a bureaucratic formality. It is the invisible boundary that aircraft must clear during take-off and landing. When structures penetrate it, pilots face steeper climb gradients, reduced descent options, and diminished room for error.
Engineers describe the consequences bluntly: increased risk of controlled flight into terrain. In plain language, the risk of aircraft striking a building.
The survey identified the South C, Nairobi West, and Lang’ata Road corridors as the most severely affected areas. The list of offending structures spans the entire spectrum of Kenyan institutional life.
The Parliamentary Service Commission building stands six metres above its approved height. The Local Authorities Provident Fund building also exceeds the limit by six metres. Nairobi West Hospital and Nairobi East (South C) Hospital are on the list. So are Equity Holding Limited and the Shree Ambaji Temple.
Dozens of private residential apartment blocks complete the roll call — some of them exceeding approved heights by more than twenty metres.
KCAA Acting Director General Nicholas Bodo acknowledged before the committee that Nairobi County had approved many of these developments without consulting the aviation regulator at all.
The county government, entrusted with planning powers, had been issuing approvals for years in a zone where it had no business doing so unilaterally — and where the consequences of error could be fatal.
None of the forty-one structures have been ordered demolished. Not one enforcement notice has been publicly reported. Not one county official has been prosecuted for approving illegal developments in protected airspace.
The Government’s Solution: Redirect the Aircraft.
It was against this backdrop that Aviation Principal Secretary Teresia Mbaika appeared before the Senate committee with a proposal that left several senators visibly incredulous.
The government, she shamelessly indicated, was considering altering Wilson Airport’s flight path to redirect aircraft towards Nairobi National Park. This, she suggested, was one of the options on the table as part of a broader master plan for the airport.
The reasoning offered was that there are “many proposals” for dealing with the situation. Wilson Airport must be considered alongside Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in any long-term planning exercise. A decision, the PS said, must be made.
What was conspicuously absent from the PS’s presentation was any mention of enforcement. No timeline for demolitions. No prosecution of lawbreakers.
No accountability for the planning failures that created the problem in the first place. Instead, the proposal was, in effect, to move aviation around the obstruction rather than remove the obstruction from aviation’s path.
The committee was not persuaded. Nominated Senator Peris Tobiko flatly rejected the flight path proposal, describing it as a measure that would reward developers who had deliberately ignored aviation regulations. The senator’s position was unambiguous: the law must be enforced, not circumvented to accommodate those who broke it.
Kitui Senator Enoch Wambua asked the question that cuts to the heart of the matter. Was the government, he wanted to know, seeking to protect rogue developers rather than enforce aviation law?
It is a question that deserves a direct, public, and accountable answer.
Whose Interests Are Being Protected?
COFEK does not make allegations without foundation. But the pattern of conduct in this matter is not subtle. Forty-one illegal structures have been identified.
The law provides clear enforcement mechanisms. KCAA has the authority to act. Nairobi County officials can be held to account. And yet the only proposal emerging from the government is one that leaves every illegal structure standing and asks aircraft to fly a different route.
Kenyans who are familiar with Wilson Airport’s neighbourhood will not need to be told what sits in close proximity to it.
Weston Hotel — the establishment whose high level political ownership and construction have been the subject of prolonged scrutiny, public controversy, and court proceedings over several years — is located in the vicinity.
Its presence and height relative to the airport’s protected airspace have been matters of record and public concern for a considerable time.
COFEK notes the proximity. COFEK notes the pattern of non-enforcement. COFEK notes that the only solution being presented by the executive is one that moves the aircraft rather than the obstruction.
And COFEK invites Kenyans to draw their own conclusions from the totality of these facts.
The government built nothing illegally. Private developers and public institutions did. But it is the aircraft — and the travelling public — that must now bear the consequences.
What the Law Requires. What COFEK Demands.
The legal position is clear. The Civil Aviation Act and the attendant KCAA regulations impose firm obligations on structures within defined proximity to aerodromes.
The Obstacle Limitation Surface is not advisory. Structures that violate it are unlawful. KCAA has both the authority and the obligation to require their removal or modification.
The county government’s approval of structures in contravention of these requirements does not cure the illegality; it compounds it.
COFEK demands that KCAA immediately issue formal enforcement notices to the owners and operators of all forty-one identified structures, requiring compliance or demolition within a defined statutory timeline.
COFEK demands that the Cabinet Secretary for Roads and Transport publicly confirm that no alteration to Wilson Airport’s flight path will be approved until full enforcement action has been taken against every illegal structure.
COFEK demands that the Director of Public Prosecutions investigate the role of Nairobi County officials who approved these developments in breach of aviation law.
COFEK further demands that Parliament summon KCAA, the Ministry of Transport, and Nairobi County to a joint accountability session to table a credible remediation plan with binding timelines.
The travelling public has a right to know that the airspace around Wilson Airport is safe.
That assurance cannot be given while forty-one illegal structures remain standing and the only plan on offer is to move the aircraft.
