A Deadly Event “Crashes” A Safety Celebration
When he was in office during the early 1960s, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was asked by a journalist to name the biggest threat to his government. He famously answered: “Events, dear boy. Events.”
Indeed, it seems that recent aviation events have flummoxed government officials in Nigeria.
On Oct. 23, marking the first anniversary of the Bellview airlines Flt. 210 B737 crash, Nigerian President Obasanjo declared open a lavish 320M naira (US$2.5M) memorial arcade that had been erected at Lisa village in Ogun State to commemorate the site of the tragedy, where all the victims reside together in a filled-in crater.
In another speech earlier that day, Aviation Minister Dr Babalola Borishade claimed that weather forecasting and competencies had improved tremendously following the 2005 bad weather crashes that had claimed 225 lives. He unequivocally stated that all regulations needed to ensure safety “are now in place”.
Yeah. Sure. Right. Six days later on Sunday, Oct. 29, in what prima facie appears to be yet another weather related crash, a 23-year-old 737-200 of ADC Airlines crashed taking off from Abuja during a thunderstorm. There were only seven survivors from the 106 persons on board.
Among the dead was Ibrahim Muhammadu, who as Sultan of Sokoto was the leader of the Muslim community which makes up about half of Africa’s most populous nation. His son was one of the two senators that also died in the crash.
And yet, despite these embarrassing setbacks (and in large part, because of them), Nigeria seems to be slowly moving its aviation sector into the 21st century.
The airline involved in the Oct. 29 crash, ADC, is a popular domestic operator with an aging fleet of mostly fifth-hand Boeing jets. The 1990s saw a number of accidents with ADC Airlines planes. In August 1994 and July 1995, two DC-9-31s were written off in non-fatal accidents, both at Monrovia-Spriggs Payne Airport. On Nov. 7, 1996 a Boeing 727-231 en route from Port Harcourt to Lagos went out of control and crashed after a near miss incident, killing all 143 on board. On July 29, 1997 a BAC One-Eleven 203AE landing at Calabar overshot the runway and an engine caught fire. There was one fatality.
Two weeks ago, ADC’s chief executive officer Capt. Mfon Udom told a Nigerian newspaper he expected his airline to be re-certified by the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority to meet international safety standards by the end of 2006.
Sunny Assurances, Dark Record
ADC Flt. 53 was the fourth significant air crash in Nigeria in just over a year. On Oct. 22 last year, 117 people died when the Bellview Airlines Boeing 737 crashed in the countryside shortly after takeoff from the commercial capital Lagos. Seven weeks later, a Sosoliso Airlines DC9 crashed on landing in Port Harcourt, the oil industry hub in the southeast. That crash killed 106 people, half of whom were children on their way home from boarding school for the Christmas break.
On Sept. 17 this year, 12 senior army generals and three other military personnel were killed when a small air force plane crashed in central Benue state. The Dornier 228-212 crashed into a hillside in bad weather only 18 miles short of its destination. The latest tragedy comes a fortnight before the aviation industry is due to undergo an important ICAO safety audit. After last year’s crashes, President Olusegun Obasanjo had ordered airlines and aviation authorities to drastically improve safety standards.
Air traffic in Nigeria has more than doubled to over eight million passengers a year in the last seven years, but the country’s aging airports and fleets have struggled to cope with the boom. Stakeholders held meetings with the president, during which shady deals among operators and regulatory officials were revealed. Airlines were accused of cutting corners on issues of maintenance, while regulatory officials were blamed for indulging operators in malpractices.
The regulatory body, the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA), was admonished for not enforcing safety rules and its inspectors were accused of brazen corruption. Dr. Borishade was directed by the president to turn around the aviation sector. The minister, in carrying out this directive, sacked top management staff in the NCAA, the Nigerian Airspace Management Agency (NAMA) and the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN). The head-lopping was characterized as a great housecleaning that hit the industry on Dec. 10, 2005.
In February this year, the aviation ministry organized a national workshop on quality assurance and safety to address inadequacies within the industry. This led to the formation of various committees which had identified areas allotted to work on in preparation for the aviation safety audit by ICAO next month. The new management team at NCAA, headed by Dr. Segun Demuren, an aeronautical engineer, has in the last few months grounded airlines for safety violations while licenses of pilots, engineers and certificates of air traffic controllers were suspended for various violations.
The agency generated $80,000 in fines from six domestic airlines for safety infringements. Operating certificates of others were suspended, and the agency made it “voluntarily compulsory” for the airlines to subscribe to the IATA operational safety audit [IOSA], which aspires to even higher safety standards than those prescribed by ICAO. Three airlines have so far subscribed to the $60,000 cost of the IATA safety audit.
A process of easing airline mergers and acquisitions was facilitated to encourage larger entities and to discourage undercapitalized airlines from persevering with their hand- to-mouth style of operating. A Technical Committee was set up to undertake a technical audit of the airlines and airplanes plying the country’s air routes to ascertain their airworthiness. The committee was headed by Mrs. Forishade Odutola, rector, Nigeria College of Aviation Technology (NCAT), Zaria.
As a result, training of technical personnel has been stepped up and overseas professionals have been recruited to bolster manning in critical areas. A few airlines are supporting the training of pilots at the Aviation College in Zaria. NAMA is upgrading navigational aids and the first phase of the Total Radar Coverage Project (TRACON), the Lagos axis, has been completed and is due for commissioning in 2007.
Meanwhile, the Safe Tower Project for enhancing Air Traffic Services and airspace management is on course. Ten Doppler VORs are being deployed to 14 airports. The four major airports of Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt, and Kano now have installations of category III Instrument Landing Systems (ILS) to enable all-weather approaches in the wet season. It all seems to make sense. Admittedly these measures are reactive rather than proactive — but universally, for all bureaucracies everywhere, that’s par for the course.
Real Or Cosmetic Progress?
A week before the latest accident, the aviation minister announced that the National Assembly had passed into law the Civil Aviation Bill. This superseded an outdated 1964 Act and gave real teeth to the reforms. In a politically significant development in early 2006, China and Nigeria signed an economic and technical cooperation agreement and various Memorandums of Understanding under which the China Development Bank would aid in satellite communications, bilateral air services and aviation infrastructure development.
In a parallel move possibly designed to counter the establishment of Virgin Nigeria, British Airways has entered into a collaborative agreement to provide airport management services and emergency response training. Upgrading of Lagos runways, fire services, perimeter fencing and aviation security infrastructure is underway. Six more cargo terminals are under construction for support of an entrepot freight movement initiative. Nigeria is fairly epicentric (or could be) for Trans-African trade, much as Singapore is for South- East Asia. To be sure, Nigeria is moving to modernize its aviation sector. But how certain is this progress? Will these legislative remedies translate into institutional reforms?
The Nigerian public and the world at large will now be asking, after this latest tragedy and in advance of the 2007 elections, whether the sweeping reforms promised were just empty rhetoric. From the sidelines it would appear that no one could accuse Obasanjo of fiddling at the margins. After the 2005 disasters, he approved a great number of radical reforms in the aviation sector. This was after he had lashed out at all the fiefdoms within the aviation ministry, condemning them as dens of corruption and threatening to hire expatriates to man the barricades if competent Nigerians were lacking.
Prominent among the re-structurings was the transfer of the Accident Investigation and Prevention Bureau (AIPB) of the Ministry of Aviation to the presidency. Under the new reforms regime, the bureau was made an autonomous agency answerable to the presidency. President Obasanjo is also tinkering with the idea of granting full autonomy to the NCAA, to free the institution from the shackles of bureaucracy and enhance its performance. But is there anything so far that would indicate any remaining institutional deficiencies are to blame for the ADC Flt 53 crash? Or did it simply stem from an aircrew decision to take off anyway, despite the nasty weather?
After visiting the crash site on Sunday, Oct. 29, Federal Territory Minister Mallam Nasir el-Rufai told a BBC interviewer that the condition of the plane had been “deplorable”, with “bald tires…quite evident”. This harsh assessment harks back to July 11, 1991 and the case of the Nationair Flt. 2120 DC8 in Jeddah, flying pilgrims back to Sokoto, Nigeria after Hajj. That charter crew had “deferred” vital remedial action on its bald tires.
At their high takeoff weight, the tires burst during the first 500 feet of roll and the wheels caught fire on takeoff. Upon retracting the gear, the wheelwells caught fire and the outcome was inevitable: 261 blameless souls perished.
When all is said and done, needed safety changes can be as fundamental as just changing worn out tires. You can’t afford to tread softly, where the rubber meets the tarmac.