Fancy being stuck at the airport for 12 hours with your flight cancelled the night before a wedding in Florida? That is exactly what thousands of passengers faced at Kenya's busiest airport this week.

So here is what is happening at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, and trust us, it is a familiar story.

As reported by cbinews.tv, flight delays at JKIA rolled into a second day on Monday as a go slow by aviation workers brought operations to a near crawl. The Kenya Aviation Workers Union, KAWU, says it is not backing down yet, with Secretary General Moss Ndiema confirming that talks with government officials on Sunday ended without a deal. Fresh negotiations are now set for Tuesday from 11am, but until then the industrial action stays on.

The union says this is about far more than just a bad day at work. At the heart of it is a collective bargaining agreement with the Kenya Civil Aviation Authority that has been pending since 2015.

Yes, you read that right. Some staff have reportedly gone more than a decade without a proper pay rise. Add to that unpaid union dues, the use of temporary contracts for permanent roles, and what KAWU calls a lack of cooperation from both the Kenya Airports Authority, KAA, and Jambojet, the low cost subsidiary of Kenya Airways, and you can see why tempers have boiled over.

KAA on Sunday admitted that some flights were experiencing delays but did not give a reason. By Monday, both KAA, the KCAA and Jambojet had not responded to requests for comment. Meanwhile RwandAir was forced to cancel two flights on Sunday, citing air traffic control challenges at Nairobi.

For travellers, the human cost is real. One passenger, Rabbi Mendel Goldman, told Reuters he had been at JKIA for 12 hours waiting for a flight to a wedding in Florida. His flight was first pushed by an hour and a half to 1am, then to 4.30am, then cancelled outright. The earliest alternative? Tomorrow night.

This is not the first time JKIA has been grounded by labour unrest. The airport, which handles more than 8 million passengers a year and serves as East Africa's biggest aviation hub, saw a major shutdown in 2019 and another highly disruptive strike in September 2024 when about 10,000 KAWU members walked out over the now scrapped proposal to lease the airport to India's Adani Group for 30 years.

That plan was billed as a modernisation deal but the union argued it would lead to job losses and the arrival of non Kenyan workers.

The current action follows a similar pattern to earlier this year, when KAWU issued a seven day strike notice in February 2026 accusing KCAA of breaching a return to work formula. That dispute was settled after intervention by the Ministry of Transport, but clearly the underlying issues around the CBA were never fully resolved.

With Kenya Airways operating most of its international network out of JKIA, any air traffic control go slow has a ripple effect across the continent, from Kigali to Johannesburg to London.

We will keep tracking the talks on Tuesday. For now, if you are flying through Nairobi, check with your airline before you head to the airport.

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