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.