Pilot Errors And More
On March 1, 2012
MORE than five years after the last of the series of air crashes that claimed 380 lives, a report on the crashes has blamed “pilot error” for the accidents. It named “flight rustiness, negligence on the part of regulatory agency” among the main reasons for the incidents.
A United States Federal Aviation Administration report listed causes of the crashes that killed a generation of students of a high profile secondary school in Abuja, and the Sultan of Sokoto Alhaji Abubakar Maciddo on 29 October 2006.
“Just before the crash, alarms began sounding in the cockpit and the pilots’ incorrect actions stalled the plane. Although bad weather may have created the situation, which the pilots reacted to, they reacted inappropriately,” the report said of the 29 October accident. There were more disturbing issues.
Regulation was slack. “Even more disturbing for investigators were the airline’s operation manual for pilots and cockpit staff, which “did not contain any information on adverse weather condition as that section was blank? The Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority despite containing the blank section duly approved the manual,” the report said.
The air crashes have ceased for a while but there is no proof that regulation has improved or that the conditions that helped the crashes, including land equipment had changed.
According to the report, the captain of the Bellview Airlines that crashed on the 22 October 2005, killing 177 people, was out of operations for 14 years and had a gunshot to his head without any medical record of his treatment.
The 10 December2005 crash of a Sosoliso Airlines flight full of schoolchildren, which killed 107 people, it said, involved both pilot error and the weather.
Nigerian authorities have issued no formal reports on the crashes. However, former Aviation Minister Femi Fani-Kayode in June 2008 told a Senate enquiry on the crashes, “Not only did they not care, but some of them actually enjoyed the prospect: What we were dealing with was a cruel and unconscionable blood cult who derived their power and strength from a frenzied and insatiable lust for blood. Is it not strange that not one person has ever been brought to book or held accountable for any of these crashes? No one has ever been sanctioned, indicted, or even prosecuted for criminal negligence at the very least.”
It is unlikely this is the official position of the Nigerian government on the crashes, but when a Minister of the Federal Republic of Nigeria takes this sort of stand, there is little to wonder, why nobody has been prosecuted.
Government should make its own finding public and punish those liable for the devastation those crashes caused as a lesson to all.
