Nigerian airplane crashes, killing all 153 onboard

JON GAMBRELL

Asso­ci­ated Press

LAGOS, Nige­ria — A com­mer­cial air­liner crashed into a densely pop­u­lated neigh­bor­hood in Nigeria’s largest city on Sun­day, killing all 153 peo­ple on board and oth­ers on the ground in the worst air dis­as­ter in nearly two decades for the trou­bled nation.

The cause of the Dana Air crash remained unknown Sun­day night, as fire­fight­ers and police strug­gled to put out the flames around the wreck­age of the Boe­ing MD83 air­craft. Author­i­ties could not con­trol the crowd of thou­sands gath­ered around to see the crash site, with some crawl­ing over the plane’s bro­ken wings and stand­ing on a still-smoldering land­ing gear.

Harold Demuren, the director-general of Nigeria’s Civil Avi­a­tion Author­ity, said all on board the flight were killed in the crash. Lagos state gov­ern­ment said in a state­ment that 153 peo­ple were on the flight trav­el­ing from Nigeria’s cen­tral cap­i­tal of Abuja to Lagos in the nation’s southwest.

The flight’s pilots radioed to the Lagos con­trol tower just before the crash, say­ing the plane had engine trou­ble, a mil­i­tary offi­cial said. The offi­cial spoke on con­di­tion of anonymity as he was not autho­rized to speak to journalists.

Res­cue offi­cials feared many oth­ers were killed or injured on the ground, but no casu­alty fig­ures were imme­di­ately avail­able. Fire­fight­ers and local res­i­dents were seen car­ry­ing the corpse of a man from one build­ing, its walls still crum­bling and flames shoot­ing from its roof more than an hour after the crash.

Pres­i­dent Good­luck Jonathan later declared three days of national mourn­ing in Africa’s most pop­u­lous nation.

Jonathan “prays that God Almighty will grant the fam­i­lies of the vic­tims of the plane crash the courage and for­ti­tude to bear their irrepara­ble loss,” a state­ment from his office read.

The air­craft appeared to have landed on its belly into the dense neigh­bor­hood that sits along the typ­i­cal approach path taken by air­craft head­ing into Lagos’ Mur­tala Muhammed Inter­na­tional Air­port. The plane tore through roofs, sheared a mango tree and rammed into a wood­work­ing stu­dio, a print­ing press and at least two large apart­ment build­ings in the neigh­bor­hood before stopping.

A white, nox­ious cloud rose from the crash site that burned onlook­ers’ eyes, as pieces of the plane lay scat­tered around the muddy ground.

While local res­i­dents helped carry fire hoses to the crash site, the major chal­lenges of life in oil-rich Nige­ria quickly became appar­ent as there wasn’t any water to put out the flames more than three hours later. Some young men car­ried plas­tic buck­ets of water to the fire, try­ing to douse small por­tions. Fire trucks, from the very few that are sta­tioned in Lagos state with a pop­u­la­tion of 17.5 mil­lion, couldn’t carry enough water. Offi­cials com­man­deered water trucks from nearby con­struc­tion sites, but they became stuck on the nar­row, crowded roads, unable to reach the crash site.

The dead included at least four Chi­nese cit­i­zens, the offi­cial Chi­nese news agency Xin­hua reported late Sun­day, cit­ing Chi­nese diplo­mats in Nige­ria. Offi­cials at the Chi­nese embassy in Nige­ria could not be reached for com­ment by the AP.

Nige­ria, home to more than 160 mil­lion peo­ple, suf­fers from endemic gov­ern­ment cor­rup­tion and mis­man­age­ment. The nation also has a his­tory of major avi­a­tion dis­as­ters, though in recent years there hasn’t been a crash. In August 2010, the U.S. announced it had given Nige­ria the Fed­eral Avi­a­tion Administration’s Cat­e­gory 1 sta­tus, its top safety rat­ing that allows the West African nation’s domes­tic car­ri­ers to fly directly to the U.S.

But many trav­el­ers remain leery of some air­lines. On Sat­ur­day night, a Niger­ian Boe­ing 727 cargo air­liner crashed in Accra, the cap­i­tal of Ghana, slam­ming into a bus and killing 10 peo­ple. The plane belonged to Lagos-based Allied Air Cargo.

Offi­cials with Lagos-based Dana Air did not respond to calls for com­ment Sun­day night. The air­line has five air­craft in its fleet and runs both regional and domes­tic flights. Local media reported a sim­i­lar Dana flight in May made an emer­gency land­ing at the Lagos air­port after hav­ing a hydraulic problem.

Nige­ria has tried to redeem its avi­a­tion image in recent years, say­ing it now has full radar cov­er­age of the entire coun­try. How­ever, in a nation where the state-run elec­tric­ity com­pany is in tat­ters, the power grid and diesel gen­er­a­tors some­times both fail at air­ports, mak­ing radar screens go blank.

Sunday’s crash appeared to be the worst since Sep­tem­ber 1992, when a mil­i­tary trans­port plane crashed into a swamp shortly after take­off from Lagos. All 163 army sol­diers, rel­a­tives and crew mem­bers on board were killed.

The crash also comes as Nige­ria, which became a democ­racy in 1999 after years of mil­i­tary rule, faces increas­ing sec­tar­ian blood­shed across its largely Mus­lim north from a rad­i­cal Islamist sect known as Boko Haram. Ear­lier Sun­day, a sui­cide car bomber killed at least 15 peo­ple and wounded dozens of others.

As night began to fall Sun­day, more and more wor­ried rel­a­tives of pas­sen­gers arrived in the neigh­bor­hood, push­ing their way down the crowded, nar­row streets to make it to the crash site. One man stopped to ask about the crash, whether any pas­sen­gers walked away alive.

His eyes grew wide when he heard no one escaped alive, his hand ris­ing to his mouth. His brother was onboard.

“Oh God, we lost him,” the man whis­pered, before slowly walk­ing away.

Posted by AP News on Jun 3 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.