Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 767 takes off from small Arusha airport

The Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 767 that made an emergency landing at Arusha Airport two days ago has taken off today in a dramatic scene captured by some of the people who were at the airport.

A video posted on YouTube by Kaduguda shows the large bodied aircraft taking off hardly halfway through the 1,620m length airport. In the video a voice is heard saying in Swahili that the aircraft lifted off "...at seven hundred" indicating that the pilot used roughly 700 metres of the runway to get this large aircraft off the ground.

The emergency landing followed a failed approach at the nearby Kilimanjaro International Airport where a small aircraft had blocked part of the runway after it sustained a puncture before take off. The Ethiopian Airlines aircraft would normally have been diverted to either Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi, the Julius Nyerere International Airport in Dar es Salaam, or to Zanzibar.

Apparently, the aircraft did not have enough fuel to reach any of these three larger airports and the pilot diverted instead to the nearest but shorter airport in Arusha. News reports revealed that during the emergency landing the Boeing 767 slightly overshot the runway. No casualties were reported. The runway's length at Kilimanjaro is 3,600m.

The pilots are credited for both landing and taking off with such a large aircraft on a short runway. I believe the landing was much more difficult than the take off.