MORE than one year after the Bellview aircraft crashed in Lisa village, Ogun State, on October 22, 2005, and killed all 117 passengers and crew on board, Nigeria’s Accident Investigation Prevention Bureau (AIPB) of the Ministry of Aviation is still wringing its hands and wondering what went wrong. Although air accident investigations usually take time to be completed, one must admit that one year is time enough for the government agency to provide at least a preliminary report of its investigations. So far the AIPB is still praying and hoping that providence would lead its investigation team to the real causes of the crash of the Bellview aircraft.
In a report last week on the crash of the Sosoliso DC 9 aircraft in Port Harcourt on December 10, 2005, AIPB director Angus Ozoka made some spectacular and unprofessional speculations about the circumstances that led to the crash of the Bellview plane. According to a report in The Guardian of Thursday last week, Ozoka said that investigations into the Bellview plane crash were hampered by the failure of his agency to retrieve the aircraft’s cockpit voice recorder, flight data recorder (widely referred to as the “blackbox”), and – wait for it – “the fact that there were no survivor, no credible eyewitness, coupled with the bad radar at the Lagos Airport at that period made investigation difficult”.
Just as journalists were still grappling with Ozoka’s acknowledgement of professional incompetence by the AIPB, he released another statement that contradicted his earlier viewpoint. He said: “we don’t have to have the blackboxes to conduct investigation, but the recovery would have aided our job.” So, if the AIPB didn’t need the flight data recorder to accelerate and complete its investigations, what else is delaying the investigations? Ozoka should also be able to respond to this question: whom does the AIPB expect to recover the cockpit voice recorder? This sloppy performance by the AIPB offers no consolation to families and friends of the victims of the Bellview plane crash.
Anyone who has been following the history of air accidents in Nigeria and the poor performance record of various agencies would not be startled to hear the open confessions made by the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA), in regard to the Bellview and Sosoliso plane crashes of 2005. Earlier this month, the NCAA admitted that the emergency response record and facilities at the nation’s airports were not only poor but also inadequate. At an International Civil Aviation Organisation workshop on airport emergency planning held in Abuja, the Director-General of the NCAA, Harold Demuren, stunned his listeners when he said: “As you would recall, Nigeria had two major air crashes around this time last year in which we lost more than 200 people. Our Search and Rescue efforts were not good enough and far below expectation to say the least… The fire fighting and rescue efforts, emergency medical attention, casualties’ distribution, communication and overall coordination of response to the emergency were far below expectation.” That, in anyone’s language, is an admission of incompetence by the NCAA. That was not all. Demuren also admitted that the flaw in the country’s airport emergency response capability was evident in the Sosoliso plane crash which occurred very close to the Port Harcourt International Airport.
While the AIPB continues to grope in the dark in its attempt or lack of efforts to unravel the circumstances that led to the crash of the Bellview aircraft, the agency has managed to piece together the jigsaw on the crash of the Sosoliso DC 9 aircraft in Port Harcourt in December last year. A total of 108 people lost their lives in that accident, most of them school children. Only two people survived that air disaster. The AIPB report blamed the Sosoliso plane crash on what it described as “wind shear activity” — an unexpected change in wind direction and velocity. The accident was also blamed on poor airfield lighting, poor judgment by the airline crew, and a particularly nasty concrete drainage ditch which was badly positioned.
The report also noted that, apart from the thunderstorm and rain which hampered visibility, “the fact that the airfield lighting were not on may also have impaired the pilot from sighting the runway”. The report showed clearly a combination of human inefficiency and mechanical failures. Airport authorities all over the world install lights on the runways and in the terminal buildings so that they will actually work. It seems that lights at the nation’s airports are fitted for decorative purposes. It is someone’s responsibility to ensure that the lights are operating every time. If the lights are not working, it is because someone has failed to notice and to take action. An airport is not the same as a motor park.
During the day and during the night, airport lights are very critical to the successful taxiing, take-off and landing of aircraft. Any malfunction in the lighting system could be disastrous. As shown in the AIPB report, the failure of the lights at the Port Harcourt airport may have contributed to the pilot’s inability to notice the runway or to approximate the runway threshold from the touchdown position. In the aviation industry, certain accidents can be avoided. In many cases, however, accidents occur because of the failure of, or poor judgment by, a lousy worker to perform the tasks assigned to him or her. In this context, one must commend a recommendation in the AIPB report which urged the mandatory installation of Uninterrupted Power Supply (UPS) facilities to aid the functioning of all important aspects of the country’s airports.
The AIPB report also recommended that pilots should be alert to sudden changes in the weather. This is particularly crucial for airlines flying to Port Harcourt and other coastal areas in the country. Being conscious of sudden weather changes and the hazards associated with such changes are important skills that every pilot ought to possess. Equally significant is the recommendation which requires the Nigerian Meteorological Agency (NIMET) to provide suitable infrastructure to facilitate the generation of data on visibility and cloud conditions near airport runways, as well as the installation of other weather monitoring equipment at the airports. These are important recommendations.
The AIPB report on the crash of the Sosoliso aircraft is littered with good recommendations. The problem is whether the bureaucrats who manage the nation’s airports would implement the recommendations. The nation has lost many precious lives through avoidable air crashes. But, judging the way we carry on, including the cavalier attitude of the bureaucrats who manage the nation’s airports, one would think that the nation has not learned anything yet. The AIPB is yet to unravel the mysteries that still surround the crash of the Bellview aircraft. Many families and friends of the victims of that air disaster are still waiting for answers. As long as the AIPB investigations continue to drag, as long as the AIPB continues to look at the heavens rather than on verifiable facts on the ground, as long as no one is willing to take up the responsibility to lead the way in the investigations, so long will the families and friends of the victims continue to agonise over that terrible disaster of October 22, 2005. The investigations need to be completed as quickly as possible so that the bereaved families and friends could come to terms with that accident.