Flight or fight / Fight or flight

Today: Yemisi Aribisala, writer, editor, essayist, painter, and author of Longthroat Memoirs; and Amy Chu, artist and publisher of Camoot.Journal.

Issue No. 121

Nigerians Don't Crash, We Bounce
Yemisi Aribisala

Bear Problems
Amy Chu

Nigerians Don't Crash, We Bounce

by Yemisi Aribisala

Captain Bode Olubiyi was my uncle. He died on the 20th of April 2012. He had been ill for three years. His career as an airline pilot, flying Nigerians on Nigerian planes, spanned 30 years and most of the country’s major airlines: Nigeria Airways, Okada Air, Chanchangi Airlines, Virgin Nigeria, etc. I was of the opinion that he had impeccable instincts where his job was concerned. But given his frequent change of employment from one airline to the other, one could deduce that he was not the model employee. 

He was known for speaking his mind, often to his own detriment. On a number of occasions, my uncle refused to fly a plane because he knew the history and condition of the plane and he resented being asked to risk his life and the lives of those in his care. Consequently he endured periods of unemployment, which followed swiftly upon his refusals to fly. On more than one occasion, he got the sack. He was regarded as a crank, suspended often, yet no one who knew him doubted for one second that he knew his job in and out and that he was a good pilot. His family was often impatient with the contradiction. 

On the 29th of December 2004 en route from Port Harcourt to Lagos, the Chanchangi Airlines Boeing 727 he was flying, with registration number 5N BEU, developed technical problems. The nose wheel gear of the plane failed to deploy.

There were 81 people on board as well as six crew members. His experience, both in navigating the faulty 727 and handling the emergency situation, saved the lives of 87 people and earned him a commendation…a piece of paper signed by the Minister of Aviation. I saw it hanging on the wall. The plane crash-landed on its belly at Murtala Mohammed Airport that Wednesday night, just barely avoiding the potentially deadly sparks and fire.

The story was nobler than the shabby commendation hanging on the wall. There were many thanks given to God, many references to miracles, providence, God’s will etc. And above it all hung the inevitable question mark over the condition of the airplane and whether the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority knew what it was doing.

I had known Captain Olubiyi for most of my life. He met and married my mother’s sister when I was a toddler. Our conversations about Nigerian aviation began not because I was especially interested in airplanes, but because the Wings Aviation Beechcraft 1900D (5N JAH) belonging to James Ibori disappeared off the radar on the night of March 15, 2008.

Wings Aviation was managed by a suave Nigerian pilot, Captain Nogie Meggison. The plane was a private charter, on its way to Obudu Cattle Ranch to ferry the Executive Council members of Cross River State government to and from their yearly retreat. The plane made the “to” leg, flew back to Lagos, and on its return, to pick up the Exco members from the retreat to take them back to Calabar, it disappeared. The records state that the plane left Lagos at about 7:35 p.m.,  contacting Enugu Air Traffic Control at 7:45 p.m. and at 8:00 p.m. en route to the Bebi Airstrip in Obudu. 

Minutes after 9:00 p.m. that night, I received a call from my uncle, Captain Olubiyi. He wanted to know if my ex-husband was with me. He was in Obudu at the retreat, I responded. He asked if I had spoken to him. I said I had in fact just spoken with him. In that case he said, he could unreservedly tell me that the Wings Aviation plane that had been on its way to Obudu to pick up the Cross River State executive council members and the governor had crashed. I argued with him that there was nothing on the news about the crash. It was a bit premature to conclude that it had crashed. We would have heard something. 

He became impatient with me. It was of course a naive statement. I allowed him to clarify what I’d assumed were “allegedlys”:

1.) The plane had crashed. 

2.) The wreckage of the plane had already been sighted by helicopters belonging to the Accident Investigation Bureau. 

3.) The pilot was an old hand who had been coaxed out of retirement and offered a lot of money to fly the plane for Wings Aviation. 

4.) Wings Aviation had filed no flight plan for Obudu. 

5.) Obudu was not an area in which a pilot could rely on his instincts, no matter how good they were.

The mountains over that whole area, the wind strength and velocity, and the unpredictability of the weather, all necessitated a flight plan. The mountains presented the most danger: One minute you would be comfortably flying the plane, and the next you would be slapped against the side of a mountain, and there the story would end…in layman’s terms.

6.) Aero Contractors were the only company with a legitimate flight plan for the Obudu terrain. That gave them an edge in the aviation sector. 

The “allegedlys” became more terrifying. 

7.) The pilot’s body had been sighted outside the plane. There had been two others with him, who were probably inside the wreckage. I called my ex-husband to give him the details. He made some calls. Then he called back. It was a fantastic story.

The Nigerian aviation authorities were willing to confirm, in response to questions from media and other interested parties, that the plane had gone off the radar, but suggesting that they could confirm that the plane had crashed and/or that they were covering up a known crash was going too far. It was out of the question. Matter closed. For the next couple of hours, I occupied the tense space between my uncle and my ex-husband, calling one and then the other. Trying to tie the possibilities into something coherent. With every detail my uncle offered, my ex-husband became more annoyed and impatient. My uncle on the other end was openly giving out information that you didn’t offer, not ever, in a country like Nigeria. A country of intrigues.

8.) The plane was owned by James Ibori and James Ibori was a powerful man, one phone call from the Nigeria Civil Aviation Authority and a good friend of the president. As fantastic as the story was, he could indeed buy a whole industry’s silence with the promise of a few hundreds of thousands.

What is the price of a live person in Nigeria? What is the price of someone who has died? What is the price of three crew members who are already dead anyway? My uncle stood his ground, and so did my ex-husband.

These conversations continued over the next couple of days. On the night of the 15th of March, the media conceded that the plane had disappeared. The following day, the Nigeria Civil Aviation Authority confirmed that the wreckage of the plane had been found at a village in Yala Local Government in Cross River State. Later, that confirmation was retracted. It had been some sort of mistake. A strange sort, to my mind. But we continued to follow the media. My uncle continued to insist that the plane had in fact been found on the night it crashed.

On the 19th of March, The Daily Sun reported that the search for the plane had moved to neighbouring Cameroon. On the 24th of March, the newspaper ThisDay ran a special feature under the headline, Famous Missing Aircraft.

The disappearance of Wings Aviation’s Beechcraft 1900D is not the first mystery in the aviation industry.

For ages, there has always been one mysterious incident or the other. Here is a list of 20 famous missing aircraft… 

The Wings Aviation plane had been missing for nine days, and the writer of the feature thought these circumstances warranted a comparison to Amelia Earheart’s disappearance in the South Pacific in 1937. Media were pushing the story that the plane was in Cameroon and not in Nigeria and that the crew were alive and well. Cut to commercial.

Nigerians scoff at manuals and insurance documents and driver’s licenses. It is the way we have lived for decades and we like to think that it works for us. My uncle had battled this mindset for most of his career, growing progressively more impatient and brash. In his day, it wasn’t enough to just pass the examinations to become a pilot. Many of his colleagues flunked repeatedly, because even if you handled the technicalities perfectly, there were psychological evaluations that you would most likely fail. All these examinations and tests mattered because flying a plane was a science, not a providential exercise. It was not If God wills we will land! Insha Allah…

Throughout the nation, the randomness and the talk of God increased over the years because of powerlessness and bad governance. In that atmosphere, if you are good, or a good Christian or a good Muslim or you’ve paid your tithe or your trousers are the right length, you will be chosen through divine intervention to survive plane crashes. The outcome really has nothing to do with whether or not the piece of equipment that you are riding in was properly maintained. 

My uncle’s point of view was that in no other country would this be happening in broad daylight. He once shared with me the circumstances of his refusal to fly and his subsequent suspension from work: 

I came out ready to fly the plane but there was a boy sitting in the engine of the plane. I asked who he was. I didn’t recognise him. He wasn’t an engineer. I walked away in disgust. My employers demanded to know why I had refused to fly the plane. I motioned to the boy sitting in the engine of the plane, as if that was not good enough reason. Why would I risk my life and the life of the people that I was responsible for?

From his employers’ point of view, who the hell was he to refuse to fly? Pilots didn’t refuse to fly in Nigeria, because the Nigerian aviation industry was one of the safest in the world. Nigerians never crashed! We bounced! We had both providence and sagacity on our side. We are a country that turns its nose up at M.O.T.s and sell-by dates. If the car breaks down, you stop it, get down and put two wires together. Nigerian mechanics rarely go to school, but rather are trained in old-fashioned apprenticeship arrangements. Some go on to master engines as well as or better than formally trained mechanics, but competence, unsurprisingly, varies wildly. Many Nigerian mechanics don’t know how to read.

Our conversation on the matter of the Wings Aviation plane ended on two stern warnings. 

Yemisi. I have been in this industry for all my life. Tell your (ex-) husband that the next time someone charters a plane to put your governor on it to Obudu, they better have insider information about the condition of the plane; on the insurance up-to-dateness of the plane; on the pilot flying the plane… go and write it down, only a fool in this country will just step out on a plane without having information about that plane, especially if you have the wherewithal to buy knowledge. The pilots who have spent long enough in this industry and know its ins and outs and are not just cowboys in it for the money. No pilot in his right mind will put his family on a plane that he knows has a history and we know the planes with histories, even if they aren’t recorded on a piece of paper. It is unfortunate for the man on the street because he doesn’t have the information and can’t pay for it.

Still we waited, and nothing concrete or coherent came from the media. The plane had begun to disappear from the radar of Nigerians’ minds, if not the minds of the families of the missing crew members. At one point I was with a group of friends who insisted that the plane must be in Cameroon in the hands of gendarmes, who had detained the pilot and crew members in a dingy room and denied them phone calls. It was that kind of conclusion, no matter how unintelligent, that allowed you to go back to living your life without thinking too much about any of it. These were the questions my uncle had insisted I must answer.

The Accident Investigation Bureau is an autonomous agency reporting to the President of Nigeria. Its two main functions are to investigate and prevent airplane crashes. On the 16th of March 2008, ThisDay online quoted Mr. Nogie Meggison as having confirmed that the wreckage of the aircraft had been found in Yala, Cross River State, but there are no official records of expert identification of the crash site on or before that date. The Bureau claimed that they could not confirm the exact location of the plane in Yala. How had they learnt that the aircraft wreckage was there? 

Yala by the way at the time was the second-most-populated local government area in Cross River State. It is not a village in the remote sense of the word. The average man on the street has a mobile phone. Either an aircraft crashed in Yala on the night of the 15th or it did not.

A similar crash to the Beechcraft 1900D 5N JAH one had occurred a year and a half before, in the early hours of the morning of September 17th, 2006. A Dornier 228 twin-turboprop utility aircraft carrying fifteen Army officers and three crew members on it had also crashed on its way to Obudu. No parallels were drawn between the two crashes as a pointer to what could have gone wrong. 

The Beechcraft 1900D re-surfaced six months later. We were presented this news by the media. It was found in the thick rain forest of Besi in Obanliku local government area by hunters who presumably never went that way before. As my uncle had indicated six months earlier, the pilot’s body was outside the plane, and the other two crew members’ bodies were inside the wreckage.

The Accident Investigation Bureau took the black box to the United States and filed a report, which it had taken the agency seven years and two months to complete:

The aircraft deviated from the filed flight plan route, and flew through the airway (UA609) direct to Ikrop, instead of Potgo-Enugu and Bebi direct. The inputs into Global positioning system (GPS) gave the crew different distances to Bebi. The crew agreed on a coordinate to input and thereafter were busy trying to locate the airstrip physically. During this process the Ground Proximity Warning System (GPWS), gave signals and sound of “Terrain, terrain....pull up, pull up” several times without any of the pilots following the command. The aircraft flew into the terrain and crashed. The flight crew and passenger were fatally injured. The airplane was destroyed and there was post-crash fire. The FDR shows that the aircraft crashed at about 0920:15 hrs. at an altitude of about 3,400ft. According to the FDR analysis, the aircraft flew for 103.75 minutes before impact.

Causal Factors:

I. The flight crew conducted an approach into a VFR airfield in an instrument meteorological condition and did not maintain terrain clearance and minimum safe altitude which lead to Controlled Flight into Terrain.

II. The crew did not respond promptly to GPWS warning.

Contributory Factors

1. The flight crew was not familiar with the route in a situation of low clouds, poor visibility and mountainous terrain.

2. The Area Controllers did not detect the estimates as passed by the pilot for positions not in the filed flight plan (LIPAR and LUNDO) and omitting ENUGU.

3. The erroneous co-location of Bebi airstrip and Obudu on the NAMA Chart confused the crew.

On December 10 2005, Sosoliso Airlines Flight 1145 crashed at the Port-Harcourt International Airport. There were sixty-one Loyola Jesuit school children returning home for the holidays on the airplane. The children sat suffocating and were burnt alive. On the 3rd of June 2012, a Dana 9J-992 crashed into a building in Iju-Ishaga in Lagos. One hundred and fifty-three passengers crashed with it. 

Again and again, the system failed. The failure of aviation safety in Nigeria was not random or arbitrary. It was systematic. The number of airplane crashes is proof of this. There was a lack of accountability. There was no insistence on expertise or competence in crucial managerial roles. Those in charge were too cocky to hire consultants to help establish a better system, but shrewd enough to protect their own families with crucial coded or bought and paid for information.

The commercial enterprise was overseen by diplomats, autocrats and people who have difficulty just simply telling the truth. The system was corrupt in and out but it wasn’t a car that one could jump out of and put two wires together.

FLAMING HYDRA IRL

On July 20, join Hydra Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún at London’s Africa Centre for a screening of his new documentary, Ebrohimie Road, which focuses on the home and history of author Wọlé Ṣóyínká. The screening is part of the Africa Centre’s celebration of the Nobel laureate’s 90th birthday.

Bear Problems

by Amy Chu

Dedicated to our Darrens.

When my friend Darren announced an open spot on his 40-mile backpacking trip in Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming, planned for June, I eagerly asked to join. I’m 25 years old and I tend to say yes to everything these days. Though I’m lazy and a homebody, I’m also young enough to believe that the best thing in my life has yet to happen.

While my adventurousness is driven by fear of missing out, Darren is motivated by a true love for the outdoors, hiking, and physical challenges. Three friends and I happily let him create the packing list and organize our planning document with topographic maps, elevation graphs, and trail names like the “Death Canyon Loop.” Darren, our ever-thoughtful guardian, asked if we knew what we were getting into. The general sentiment was that we didn’t need to, as long as he did.

At Darren’s urging, I did do some research on the Grand Teton National Park—just enough to tell me that it was teeming with bears. The summer, especially, was peak season for bear cubs. Take an apex predator that weighs 700 pounds, runs 35 mph, scales trees, and breaks into locked homes and vehicles. Then bestow upon that beast a protective parenting style. That’s a combination no one wants to mess with.

Bear attacks are rare because visitors know to stay out of their way. However, the park is shared. If you do find yourself opposite a bear? If it’s a black bear, you can punch it in the nose. What about grizzlies? Well, all the bear blogs seem to shrug and suggest you play dead. At least the baby bears get a show, while their mama juggles your limp little body in the air. 

When I presented the “bear problem” to our backpacking group, Darren said we’d be fine. 

The first sign of trouble came the week before we left, when Darren dropped out due to his father’s declining health. Our delusional confidence in backpacking Grand Teton with no experience was slowly replaced by healthy doubt, after we’d lost our leader. 

We decided to forge ahead anyway. We flew from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Denver, Colorado, then drove 500 miles to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to begin our hike.

The landscape was unlike anything I had seen in New England. The land around Grand Teton is flat, with the iconic family of mountains always in the distance. We became so accustomed to their presence that it felt strange when they disappeared from sight as we drove into and onto the mountains themselves.

In the trailhead parking lot, I looked around at our group of four. Anna, Andrew, Jessie, and I were geared up in colorful 60-liter backpacks and slathered in white mineral sunscreen. We looked more like kids going to summer camp than rugged backpackers.

Then we were off!

Through the mountains and valleys, we kept a steady flow of conversation. Bears don’t care for surprises, and prefer to know that you’re coming. I was already out of breath from the first five minutes of incline, so I listened while Jessie and Andrew talked about grief; both had lost parents in high school. My eyes were a little moist; I couldn’t keep the sweat from dripping sunscreen into them.

We were stopped in a pasture for lunch when two young women splashed in freckles with golden braids caught up to us and said,

“There’s a cute bear that’s been following us. It should be headed here soon,”

… as if this was good news. I looked at the Lemon Pepper Tuna juice dripping from the packet and onto my thighs like a marinade.

“I think we should get going.”

We soon arrived at an area that was supposedly our campsite, according to our map, though we didn’t find a designated plot. We scanned the area until Jessie spotted a movement on a log. She peered into the woods and less than 10 yards away, a bear stared back. We backed away and unlocked our bear spray. Despite all our time spent on Bear YouTube and Bear Reddit, we were paralyzed. I shook in my spotless hiking boots, but I couldn’t channel my fear appropriately because I didn’t know the taxonomy of the cause.

“Look at the coin-shaped ears. That means black bear.”

“Are you taking a photo?”

“I’m zooming in to show you the hump.”

“I thought grizzlies had coin-shaped ears. Plus, he’s brown!”

“I think black bears can be brown!”

“That’s extremely confusing.

“Guys, I might have peed a little.”

As we bickered and panicked, the bear grazed in the clearing and eventually ambled back into the woods. 

The sun started to set. The mountain threw a long shadow over our nook of rocks and the river, reminding us of her beauty despite her dangers. We were shaken, exhausted, and scared, but there was a ten-mile hike on the itinerary tomorrow. Whether the bear had truly left or not, we’d have to stay.

Over our dinner of rehydrated lasagna, we discussed what to do, or, more importantly, what Darren would do. Darren would want us to keep going. Darren would want us to turn back. We should have faith in Darren’s plan. Huddled around our butane flame, Darren became a god to us.

Then, in the distance, we saw the bear again. It picked around the dirt and dawdled back into the woods. 

We clutched our bear sprays and gathered in our tent. We took a unanimous vote to turn back. With Darren no longer by our side (or reachable by cell), it was time to share the responsibility for our decisions.

Jessie and I slept back-to-back with our bear sprays between us. I woke up when something rustled our tent and Jessie yelled at it to “GTFO.” In the morning, we emerged from our tents and saw a porcupine, an old fellow, saunter away with satisfaction having licked all the salt from our tents and kept us up all night.

On our hike out, folks we passed asked if we had seen any wildlife. We had seen a bear! we exclaimed. Rather than mirror our horror, people were amused.

Park Ranger: “You guys did the right thing. They’ll leave you alone if you leave them alone.”

Mormon father: “Bear spray? I’ve got my pistol to scare them off!”

Nature specialist: “Black bears can be brown. We call them ‘cinnamon.’”

Trail runner:  “They’re just after your food, like big raccoons!”

Each time we gave an account of our night, the frightful bear, which started out as “possibly a grizzly” was reduced to “an adolescent cinnamon black bear.”

We peeled off our smelly socks, got in the car, and pulled away. With the air conditioning blasting, we began to laugh about our one-night backpacking adventure. The idea of the bear grew more and more distant as we drove away from the Tetons. Texts and emails from friends and work trickled in. How silly and how New Englander of me to assume that I could hit pause on life whenever I left my corner of the country.

Darren called us. We assumed he was just checking in, but before we could tell him about our adventure, he broke the news. Darren would move to New York by the end of the week. He wanted to be close to his mother; she needed him. Darren loved his life in Cambridge and this news shocked us. Time froze when we realized we wouldn’t be back in time to say a proper goodbye. Suddently the call ended and we were speeding away from the bears again. 

Three weeks later, we four are back home, fully back to our people problems, such as relationships, work, and keeping that expensive roof over our heads. Darren has lost his father. 

Darren has lost his father but Darren is present during grief. He shows up and grows up when it’s most difficult. This sacrifice looks superhuman to us on the outside, but he is also just a son to his parents—a very good one—and they must have been proud as hell. 

It’s a privilege to have bear problems, not that they’re easier than people problems, but it sure feels simpler—to unplug, to take paid time off, to trade my problems for such straightforward ones as bear, uphills, and carrying something heavy.

Darren and I are both only children, but he is much stronger than me, at least for now. Though I’m young enough to anticipate the best things in life, I also know that the worst—losing parents—is coming too. 

I wish all of our problems could be replaced by bear problems. Then, I wish we could pile into Darren’s tent. Tougher, we would quake with fear, clutch our bear sprays, make group decisions, and face the unknown night, only to emerge in the dewy morning and find that it was an old porcupine all along.

Jessie recently purchased a watermelon. I was incredulous.

“You carried that all the way from the grocery store?”

“It’s a seven-minute walk,” she said. “Don’t you remember our backpacking trip?”

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