Headlines: 117 Killed in Nigerian Plane Crash
Dateline: Oct 23rd, 2006

I was awoken at 7am on Sunday morning by a Nigerian friend asking me to help look for his missing niece. I had no idea of what he was asking, but soon found out that a Bellview Airlines Boeing 737-200 had gone missing the night before. I got dressed and made my way down to the airport. By the time I got there the President of Nigeria had already volunteered his two contract helicopters, a Bell 412 and a Eurocopter EC365N, to help conduct a search and rescue.

The coordinated search effort ended up being run out of our airline’s office on behalf of the President of Nigeria through the Presidential Aviation Advisor. As there was no formal request from the NEMA (National Emergency Management Agency) to organize a search I worked with the Presidential aviation advisor based on what we knew and what we had. Luckily the advisor had the experience to know what would work and what wouldn’t.

We used the two Presidential helicopters and one Police Wing helicopter to search the local area, but with no guidance from either NEMA or the control tower we had to search a very wide area with no success. We were told that the aircraft had gone missing only after three minutes into the flight, but NEMA gave us coordinates that put us 20 miles out to sea. We sent the sea survival equipped EC365N out over the ocean and sent the other two to cover the remaining 2/3rds of the search area surrounding Lagos. I was not hopeful because, without specific information from the tower as to where it had disappeared off the radar, we really did not know where to start.

A short time later we had another report from NEMA that they had received an ELT beacon signal from a village 149 miles north of Lagos. Since the report from NEMA was considered reliable, although improbable, the advisor took a volunteer Dornier 228 fixed wing to the reported crash site and I kept the Presidential helicopters in the local area to continue our search near Lagos. Later my operations coordinator, who had been to a NEMA meeting just the week before, told me that no Nigerian airline was equipped with the new 406mhz beacons except for us and one other airline, and certainly not Bellview. The idea of an ELT fix 149 miles north of where the aircraft supposedly disappeared was very suspect.

The Police Wing decided to send one helicopter to fly north to search the reported area of Kishi and the other one stayed with our effort. Chevron volunteered to give us a fuel tanker if we needed to coordinate the search out of Ibadan to reach the northern location because none of our helicopters could make it to the northern site and back again without stopping in Ibadan for refueling.

About this time I was getting phone calls from my friend saying that the family had heard there were survivors and that some passengers were actually showing up in the hospitals. A B737 crashing in the dark of night with possibly no electrical systems would not likely have survivors. So I discouraged any such hope by saying if that is true then it could only be by some miracle.

I was beginning to believe the pilot had lost his electrical systems from an errant lightning strike off the nearby thunderstorm. It was not likely but possible. I surmised that with no functioning electrical systems he could have possibly wandered 149 miles north until he crashed. I kept saying that if the aircraft had indeed crashed nearby, like at the 5 minute mark after takeoff when he supposedly failed to make a requested altitude call, then we would be getting mobile (cell) phone calls from someone… anyone. Someone in the crash area would call someone, who would call someone they know, until they reached the police commander or the state governor. There was a saying that in American you could find anyone, including the President of the United States, with three phone calls. But, so far we had not had that call.

By the time the Dornier 228 pilot, with the Presidential advisor on board, radioed in that he was over the reported site and could not find any wreckage I began to believe the aircraft was indeed nearby and not up north as NEMA kept insisting. I called back the B412 which I had originally dispatched to help with any rescue attempts if and when they found the northern crash site. I was waiting for a phone call. I was not sure from who, but I knew we would get one soon.

As Bellview did not have any search capacity themselves they too had come down to our office to ask for help. We had the Chairman of Bellview Airlines in our office waiting and hoping for news. Just about then the Bellview Chairman received a phone call from the Governor of Ogun State saying that they had located the crash site nearby Ifo in the village of Lisa. We immediately radioed the coordinates to our B412 pilot who was searching nearby but the coordinates had been calculated incorrectly and he came back low on fuel. After we recalculated the coordinates we passed them on to the EC365N pilot who had just refueled and he found the crash site within 20 minutes.

The Police Wing Bell 427 pilot borrow fuel off of us as they did not have any of their own and headed to the crash site. Our B412 refueled and landed at the site long enough to drop the civil aviation and crash investigation personnel. Once the NEMA helicopters showed up on site we pulled out our helicopters and although we were approached by many parties, including the American Embassy, to continue flying I discontinued our part of the operation. There was simply nothing more we could do. There were no survivors.

Impact Crater

What we found was an incredible smoking crater, 20 meters across and 10 meters deep, that was obviously created by an uncontrolled plunge from altitude. Ironically we found the crash exactly where we thought it should have been if the pilot had failed to make a critical altitude call about 5 minutes after take-off with a right turn out toward Abuja. If the tower had simply given us this crucial information to begin with we would have found the site very quickly that morning.

Smoking Hole

Despite the fact there were 117 persons on board there were no bodies. At least there were no complete bodies. The aircraft was totally destroyed and the bodies had disintegrated on impact. The other thing missing was personal effects. No purses or briefcases or wallets or suitcases. By the time the police and army made to into the site, the “area boys” (local criminals) had looted everything. The police commander, although not forgiving the transgressions of the looters, graciously blamed the acts on abject poverty. That is what we are reduced to in extreme poverty he said. When we have nothing we have nothing to lose.

President’s Visit

I had the sad responsibility to call my friend and tell him that there was no possible way his niece would have survived such an impact. He took the news graciously but obviously with a heavy heart.

By 15:30 I was in the gym at the Sheraton Hotel doing my Sunday workout and CNN was still reporting the aircraft as missing and commenting on the conflicting reports of whether the crash site was in Kishi or Lisa. The good news for me was that, as I have done several times before, I managed to keep one step ahead of CNN with the facts.

One thought I will leave you with is: Why was there no widespread fire associated with the crash? Where was the jet fuel?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 2nd, 2005 at 11:29 am and is filed under Anuenki. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.