LONDON: The chairman of Middle East Airlines on Tuesday threatened to draft in hunters to shoot seagulls posing a threat to flight safety at Beirut airport if the Lebanese government failed to address the issue.
Mohamad El-Hout, head of Lebanon’s national carrier, said he was giving the state a choice between “the intervention of security forces or permitting the MEA to bring in hunters.”
Beirut–Rafic Hariri International Airport has seen a steady proliferation of the birds drawn to the nearby Costa Brava landfill site.
Since the waste tip was opened in 2016, the number of seagulls soaring around the city airport has increased dramatically, raising plane accident concerns over birds being sucked into aircraft engines.
El-Hout called on Lebanon’s interior minister to act, otherwise he would have to resort to the solution used in 2017 when the airline recruited 125 hunters and gave them the ammunition to kill more than 10,000 seagulls.
The then Transport Minister Youssef Fenianos failed to deliver on a promise to deal with the problem after local media reported a MEA flight encountering a flock of birds as it landed on the airport’s west runway.
Fenianos had suggested installing extra devices around the airport to emit bird of prey calls to scare off the gulls, a solution welcomed by environmental groups.
Activists and environmental groups have long protested against the landfill and called on authorities to close the site to solve the bird issue altogether and avoid an “extermination campaign.”
On the seagull problem, You Stink activist Lucien Bourjeily, said: “We call for eliminating the main reason behind this crisis, which is the Costa Brava landfill.”
Seagulls are a globally protected species and addressing their proliferation requires tackling the issue of the Costa Brava landfill, which was originally opened as an interim solution after the closure of the main landfill receiving waste from Beirut.
El-Hout argued at the time that “preserving passengers’ safety is the priority” and “while the environmental committee objected, I had to choose: Either the seagulls flew, or the MEA flew.”
MEA recently hit the headlines after a series of unusual incidents. On Saturday, stray bullets fired during new year celebrations in Lebanon’s capital hit two of the airline’s planes parked at the airport. In a similar incident in November, a stray bullet hit an MEA plane as it landed in Beirut. No casualties were recorded.
And in August, an MEA plane flying from Madrid to Beirut was for several minutes flanked by two NATO military jets after the pilot Abed El-Hout, son of the company’s chairman, failed to respond to routine radio calls.
