Welcome to Mwanza, Lake Victoria, Tanzania … and welcome to Darwin’s nightmare!

About 20 years ago I saw an interesting documentary. It started with an Il-76 freighter landing at an airport along a coast or lakeside (Lake Victoria as it turned out). The mixed Russian/Ukrainian crew delivered crates of “equipment” (wink wink) from Eastern Europe. The main reason for their flight though was what the cargo for the return trip would be: fresh fish … top quality Nile Perch fillets for Western European consumers.

Here’s where it gets interesting. Although Lake Victoria is one source of the Nile, the above-mentioned Nile Perch is not a native fish. It was introduced in the 1950s to boost the fisheries in the lake. Within a couple of decades however, it wiped out the native fish population, which were predominately of the cichlid family. Now if you don’t know about cichlids, they are one of the most diverse species of fish. They are also very popular aquarium fish because of their striking colours as well as their behaviour (quite intelligent as fish go). In the African Great Lakes alone they evolved more than a thousand different species, adapted for different environments. Well, as far as Lake Victoria is concerned, of its 500 species of cichlids, 200 are now extinct, the rest seriously endangered. What’s more, the decline of primarily vegetarian cichlids had a negative impact on the lake’s water quality. Many cichlid species are algae eaters, and their absence contributed to algal blooms, which in turn led to extensive fish kills, including that of the Nile Perch.

The really sad thing is that the Nile Perch catch isn’t available to the local Tanzanian population (or Ugandan for that matter), but purely destined for export. And, yes, the airport that the Il-76 operated into was Mwanza. Darwin’s Nightmare, a documentary well worth watching if you can find it.

Mwanza, Tanzania. ICAO: HTMW. Busyish regional airport on Lake Vic. DH8Ds/ATRs from and to Dar (HTDA) and Bukoba (HTBU), Caravans to surrounding camps, heavy iron (unspecified cargo) into the Heart of Darkness … ahem Europe…

See “Dependencies” for the libraries required. In addition, I’ve used objects from various handcrafted airports/world updates, so if you don’t have them installed there may be missing bits.

The scenery includes static FSLTL aircraft. If you don’t want them, or aren’t running FSLTL, disable (rename)/delete the following file after you’ve dragged the scenery to you Community folder:

scenery\sltcreations\XHTMW_Statics.bgl

Bing/MSFS has some pretty old imagery of the airport (no surprise). I’ve updated the runways and aprons to a more current version. I did not however update the imagery, even though Google is a little more up-to-date. So, the new terminal that has recently been built is absent (there’s a crane in its place). However, since the terminal is of the kind that deposits passengers onto a bus rather than one with aerobridges, the absence shouldn’t affect the way a flight crew would experience the place.