Grounding Leaves Fliers Stuck in Md.

Bintu Turay of Freetown, Sierra Leone, and other passengers who were supposed to fly on Ghana Airways have stayed at the Ramada Inn in Laurel. (Mark Gail -- The Washington Post)

U.S. and Ghanaian officials negotiated yesterday over the federal government's decision to block flights of Ghana's state-run airline -- a key link between West Africa and the United States -- but none of that urgency was palpable at the Ramada Inn in Laurel, where Salifu Mboge had just been shut out of a lunch buffet.

Mboge was one of about 40 Ghana Airways passengers marooned at the motel since U.S. transportation officials took the unusual step Tuesday of suspending the airline's right to fly in and out of the United States and impounded its DC-10 at Baltimore-Washington International Airport, citing questions about safety and permits.

Since his flight was canceled early last week, the brewery engineer said, gifts he bought while visiting his sister in North Carolina were stolen out of his luggage at BWI, Ghana Airways officials failed to show up for meetings about getting people home, and he has had to eat every meal at the motel's buffet, since that's what the airline paid for.

Except yesterday's lunch. He was late and was told he would not be fed.

"I should have been at work on Tuesday," said Mboge, 45, from Kololi, Gambia. "And communication [with the airline] is terrible. They said they'd come back last night, but they didn't. Now we hear from the hotel manager there will probably be a flight Tuesday, but we don't know what airline. Even if you have money, flights [on other airlines] are full."

Hundreds of passengers of Ghana Airways were stranded across the region and in the Ghanaian capital of Accra, where a U.S. Embassy official declined to give much detail about negotiations.

"It's a sensitive issue and is being followed from the president's office because negotiations are taking place," said Kevin Doyle, the duty officer at the embassy. Doyle said he didn't know how many people were stuck in Accra.

Although several airlines operate flights between Accra and Europe, Ghana Airways flies the only direct route between West Africa and the United States. The airline has four scheduled flights a week to the United States, landing at BWI and John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York.

Robert Johnson, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Transportation, said his agency was "working hard to put diplomatic pressure on the airline and the government" to help stranded passengers.

No one answered the phone at a half-dozen phone numbers Ghana Airways listed on its Web site for people calling about the suspension. The site said the company was working "to resolve all allegations and resume normal operations as soon as possible." No one answered at Ghana's government offices, which were closed for the weekend, and the Ghanaian Embassy in Washington was closed.

Johnson described the investigation into Ghana Airways as "a web" and said no one at the agency could remember a time when an airline was completely halted from flying.

The situation developed last weekend, when U.S. inspectors spotted corrosion on the DC-10 the airline uses to fly into and out of the United States, said Brian Turmail, another Transportation Department spokesman. The aircraft had been ordered grounded, but the airline made two trans-Atlantic round-trip flights with it anyway, Johnson said.

Officials then discovered the airline had let its permit expire in mid-July but was still flying. Johnson said the Transportation Department was also bothered that the airline doesn't belong -- as most airlines do -- to an industry association that lets other airlines pick up its passengers if something happens to its planes.

"We have some significant concerns about this airline," he said.