FLYING into Somalia is a tricky business. With the country carved sure what will greet them when the wheels touch down.
Last January, a Kenyan pilot had just landed in the southern port of Kismayo when rival militia started fighting over his cargo, several tonnes of the popular leaf drug khat.
Before he knew what was happening, bullets were flying through the windscreen. Luckily, he managed to bail out just before his craft was destroyed in a hail of gunfire.
Such is the violent environment that Joe Brunswig, the man in charge of Somalia's skies, has to deal with. The Canadian nonchalantly describes the shooting as just another "incident" caused by the khat trade.
Then again, he can afford to be cool about the danger of Somalia: he doesn't even live there. When the UN pulled out of the war-torn country in 1995, it decided the safest way to continue air-traffic control was from another country. Brunswig moved the operation to a house in a wealthy suburb of Nairobi, the Kenyan capital.
The project has become such a success that some 1,800 flights pass through Somali airspace every month. His team of controllers, mostly Somalis, make sure they don't bump into one another.
It is a no-frills affair. The control room has no banks of flashing lights or glowing radar screens, just a pair of telephones, some high-powered radios and a map of Somalia. The controllers follow each plane's progress by pushing markers from one point on a grid to the next.
They are responsible for everything from Air France jumbos carrying honeymooners to the Seychelles to small Cessnas ferrying passengers, khat and, sometimes, weapons.
Although resources are tight - last year's budget was just $2.5million - the operation has a solid safety record. Even spacecraft can land at the airstrip in Berbera, which in better times was maintained by NASA as an emergency runway for its shuttles.
And not every part of Somalia has been crippled by war. The northern Somaliland province, which considers itself an autonomous state, is peaceful and quietly prospering.
Brunswig is convinced that safe air access is crucial to further development, but he lacks the money to put basic infrastructure, such as good runways, in place.
And then there are the goats.
A while ago, a landing plane mowed down a goat that had been grazing at the end of the runway. Brunswig was furious when he heard the airport manager had paid the owner twice the market value in compensation.
"I told them they shouldn't," he smiles. "Otherwise, we'll have all the local guys coming to the airport trying to get their goats killed. Its makes good business sense."
