11:54 BST
Peter Mwai and Richard Irvine-Brown
BBC Verify
We have been closely monitoring operations at Sudan’s Khartoum International Airport after the resumption of civilian flights this week. They’d been suspended for more than two years following the outbreak of civil war.
We use a variety of methods to track flights, including verified video and images of landings and departures, but a key tool has been flight tracking sites such as Flightradar24.
We noticed that the site would give arrival and departure times but after those had passed it would add the label “unknown” with no subsequent tracking data available on the site.
We approached Flightradar24 for clarification and they said airlines sometimes fail to remove their regular schedules from the third party sites it uses for data even when an airport has been closed down, so flights still appear as due to arrive or depart.
“Flights are listed as unknown after the scheduled time of departure/arrival has passed and we have not received an updated schedule or tracked the aircraft” Ian Petchenik, the company’s communications director told us.
Since Khartoum airport officially opened for commercial traffic on Wednesday, with the arrival and departure of the first passenger flight since 2023, we have not identified any further arrivals or departures.
Image source, Flightradar24