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Nigeria: Mystery of a Missing Plane
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This Day (Lagos)
27 March 2008
Posted to the web 28 March 2008
Lagos
A palpable air of mystery still surrounds the fate of the Beechcraft 1900D aircraft, belonging to Wings Aviation Limited, declared missing some days ago. The plane, on a chartered flight from Lagos to Bebi Airstrip, Obudu, in Cross River State was said to have disappeared from the radar about five minutes to landing.
Aviation regulation authorities had earlier told the nation that they had found the wreckage of the missing plane, with all its three crew members dead, in a village in Cross River State. But Nigerians were stunned 24 hours later when the Minister of State for Air Transportation declared that the initial discovery claim was false.
The confusion that is playing out again in our aviation sector is a sad reminder of the Bellview plane crash of October 22, 2005, when for nearly 24 hours the site of the disaster could not be located. Initial search and rescue attention was focussed on far away Kishi in Oyo State while the crash site was eventually located in Lissa-Igbore near Ota, Ogun State, after all the 117 passengers and crew on board were already dead.
As things stand now, nobody is sure what has happened to Beechcraft 1900D and its crew. One thing that is clear now is that the nation's aviation sector is on trial, as the defect in the country's emergency response preparedness has again been starkly revealed. This is as tragic as it is embarrassing.
So helpless is the nation's search and rescue operation that the authorities have resorted to primitive methods of looking for the missing plane by enlisting Fulani herdsmen and local hunters in the search party. Need we go this far, when even a simple device as Google Earth can help in searching anywhere in the world for anything, no matter the topography?
It is not as if the government does not realise that it only takes proper equipment and training of relevant authorities and personnel with the statutory and professional duty for search and rescue to be able to rise to this type of occasion.
But then, what happened to the directive by the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) that all airlines in the country fit their aircraft with Emergency Locator Transmitters (ELT). This device helps search crews locate crashed planes and rescue survivors quickly. Was this Wings aircraft fitted with the device? The answer is probably no. Else it would have facilitated the quick discovery of the plane if it actually crashed.
Again, why has the country not achieved total radar coverage of its airspace, even as the project would not cost more than 66 million Euro (about N12 billion)? The cost is nothing in view of the capability of the project to keep the entire country constantly under radar surveillance. This would make tracking any missing aircraft easier, surer and quicker.
Is it by sheer coincidence that most of the recent air mishaps in the country occur on weekends, mostly Saturdays? It would look as if this is becoming a familiar but sad trend. Recall the EAS crash of May 4, 2002; the Bellview crash of October 22, 2005; the Sosoliso crash of December 10, 2005 and the ADC crash of October 29, 2006. And now Wings Aviation plane, whose fate still remains unknown. Doesn't this say something about our attitude to work on weekends, especially those supposed to be on essential services?
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Is there anything wrong with Obudu terrain that is fast turning it into a virtual no-flying zone? This incident is happening barely two years after a similar one occurred around the area with the crash of a Dornier 228 Air Force plane, killing 13 Army Generals.
One unfortunate thing about all this is our lackadaisical attitude to investigation into the cause of air crashes.
Government should do an urgent rethink of the country's transportation policy with a view to giving land-based transportation its proper place in the scheme of things. If comfortable road transportation were in place, it probably wouldn't have been necessary for Governor Imoke to summon a plane from Lagos to come and pick him from Obudu to nearby Calabar. And the disaster that is now staring us in the face would have thus been avoided.
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