Wilson
Airport

Wilson is the safari and bush aviation hub of Kenya and one of the busiest general aviation airports in Africa. It is where the light aircraft that fly the Maasai Mara, Lamu, Samburu and the northern circuit are based. If your trip involves getting into the bush rather than into Nairobi, this is the field the flying actually happens from.

Some can, many cannot, and this is the question to settle before anything else. The longer runway is 5,052 feet, the other 4,798 feet, and the field sits at 5,546 feet of elevation. That combination, short pavement and thin air, is far more limiting than the runway figures suggest on their own. Light jets can work in the right conditions. Anything larger usually goes to Jomo Kenyatta and transfers by road.

Because it compounds. Wilson is higher than JKIA at 5,546 feet, and Nairobi is warm year round, so density altitude on an afternoon departure sits well above the field elevation. At JKIA that is absorbed by 13,507 feet of runway. At Wilson there is a third of that. Performance is calculated for the specific aircraft, temperature and payload rather than assumed, and the answer changes through the day.

Yes, and unusually for a field in this library it genuinely matters. Much of the fleet operating out of Wilson is piston or turboprop rather than jet, so AVGAS availability is a real operational fact rather than a footnote. Jet A-1 is available too.

About two and a half miles, against roughly eleven for Jomo Kenyatta. In Nairobi traffic that difference is worth considerably more than the mileage suggests, and it is one of the main reasons corporate travellers and tour operators prefer Wilson when the aircraft allows it.

Long haul into Jomo Kenyatta, clear customs there, transfer by road to Wilson, then light aircraft into the Mara or the northern circuit. The road transfer across Nairobi is the part people underestimate, and it should be planned with real traffic in mind rather than a map estimate. Where the inbound aircraft can use Wilson directly, that transfer disappears, which is why the aircraft question matters so much.

Kenya landing and overflight permits are issued by the Kenya Civil Aviation Authority and apply the same way as for any Kenyan airport. We plan on 72 business hours. The KCAA will want aircraft type and maximum takeoff weight, airworthiness and registration certificates, worldwide insurance, crew licences and the schedule.

Handling is available and we arrange it regardless, but we have not been able to confirm from an authoritative source whether it is formally mandatory, so we do not claim that it is. On a field this busy the practical answer is that you want an agent whatever the regulation says.

Very, and it is running well beyond what it was designed for. The airport was originally laid out for around half a million passengers a year and handles substantially more, with a single terminal that is acknowledged to be under strain. A flight training school also operates from the field. Expect a busy circuit and plan turnarounds accordingly.

Florence Kerr Wilson, a wealthy widow who established the airport as Nairobi West Aerodrome in 1929 at a cost of fifty thousand pounds, and whose airline Wilson Airways was based there. She hired the pilot Tom Campbell Black to run it. The airport was renamed in her honour in 1962, and she died in 1968.

After the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 the airport, its fleet and its pilots were taken over by the colonial government and it became a Fleet Air Arm base. It returned to civilian operation after the war and has been a civil airport since.

Wilson if the aircraft fits and you are going to the bush or into central Nairobi. Jomo Kenyatta if you are arriving internationally, need customs, or are flying anything the short runways at altitude will not take. For most long-haul arrivals the honest answer is JKIA plus a road transfer, and the Wilson leg is the light aircraft that follows.

East Africa Time, UTC+3, all year. Kenya does not observe daylight saving.