One volcano, Nyiragongo, is so close that its January 2002 eruption destroyed the north end of runway 18/36, leaving just 2 kilometres (1.2 mi) for aircraft operations.

[8] The aircraft subsequently overran the runway and crashed at 14:30 local time (12:30 UTC), impacting concrete homes, shops and market stalls.

[23] Members of the 6th Battalion of the Sikh Light Infantry, Indian Army, who were posted there as part of the North Kivu Brigade of the UN Mission in Congo (MONUC), swung into action to effect a rescue of 6 survivors and retrieve 18 bodies.

Indian Army personnel were also involved in initial crowd control and preventing the fire that arose from spreading to thickly populated areas nearby.

[25] One Kinshasa paper, Le phare, reports that airports throughout the country are still using fifty-year-old infrastructure from the Belgian colonial era.

(The responsibility for the crash of a Hewa Bora Airways DC 9 on 15 April in Goma, lies completely irrefutably with the Congolese government, according to Renadhoc, the National Network of Non-Governmental Human Rights Organisations in the DRC.

)-Radio Okapi 2008-04-21The German government sponsored a €15 million, three-year project to rehabilitate the 1,100-metre (3,600 ft) of buried runway following the Hewa Bora crash, but that work had been suspended when another aircraft, operated by CAA (Compagnie Africaine d'Aviation) overran onto the lava in November 2009.

[30] In their 2011 report to Congress, the NTSB classified this accident as a major ongoing investigation in which they were assisting the Democratic Republic of the Congo.