Air Uganda will remain grounded for at least one month after independent aviation experts ordered a fresh safety audit before it resumes operations.

The five-phase audit will take 28 days, starting with a pre-application, which the airline has so far negotiated.

At the time of going to press, the carrier’s officials were in the process of submitting the application to complete the second phase.

The next phases of the audit will evaluate the airline’s application and the company’s implementation of safety measures by testing the crew and aircraft.

The EastAfrican has learnt that the independent audit team has dismissed earlier reviews by Uganda’s Civil Aviation Authority that led to the withdrawal of Air Uganda’s air operator’s certificate on June 17, along with those of two other operators — the Ministry of Defence-owned Uganda Air Cargo Corporation and private airline Transafrik Uganda Ltd.

READ: Three airlines suspend flights in Uganda over licences

The five-man audit team comprises three lead consultants — two aviation experts from the Kenya Civil Aviation Authority and one from the Civil Aviation Safety and Security Oversight Agency of the East African Community. The other two are CAA officials acting as observers.

The grounding of Air Uganda, which operated eight routes — Entebbe to Juba, Nairobi, Mombasa, Dar es Salaam, Kilimanjaro, Kigali, Bujumbura and Mogadishu, carrying up to 6,400 passengers per week — means travellers around the region must brace themselves for tough times.

Barely two weeks after Air Uganda was suspended, the air fares more than doubled on some routes as competitors took advantage of the crisis.

Industry regulator Civil Aviation Authority suspended the three airlines after a review of their systems, structures and operations by the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO).

But, upon summoning and querying CAA officials last week, the parliamentary Infrastructure Committee of parliament, which has an oversight mandate on the transport sector, concluded that the regulator had “lied and used the weaknesses of the three airlines” to cover up it own failures.