THE field of commercial aviation was our major strength and rightly so. Between November 2006 and May 2012, the nation recorded no fatal air crash, especially by Nigerian commercial airlines.
In the galaxy of so-called ‘highly reliable organisations”, none shone as brightly as aviation.
How did the airlines achieve this impressive record? The answer: A mix of good regulations, highly trained personnel, widespread standardisation, rigorous use of checklists, strict work-hours regulations, and highly functional systems designed to help the cockpit crew and the industry learn from errors and near misses.
But in all of these, it still remained to be known what actually went wrong with Dana Flight 0992 that crashed in Iju-Ishaga, a Lagos suburb.
Undoubtedly, the real challenge faced by Nigerian airline industry is to ensure safe and secure transportation of air passengers.
After every aviation disaster, it is necessary to determine the causes of mishap through impartial investigation and to develop safety recommendations in order to prevent similar accidents from re-occurring.
What are the lessons from this terrible tragedy?
“Well, it certainly doesn’t mean that we should abandon aviation as a safety model. But the crash is a cautionary tale of the highest order. We need to ensure that our personnel have the skills to manage crises caused by technology failures that they’ve come to rely on”, said the Assistant Secretary General of Airline Operators of Nigeria, Alhaji Mohammed Tukur .
“We should continue to push crew for resource management training and work on strategies to bolster situational awareness.’'
Until the final report of the accident is made public, the cause of the accident would remain in the realm of conjecture.
While the Accident Investigation Bureau (AIB) recently released an interim report of the Dana crash, stakeholders are still eager to know exactly what led to the accident.
The real noticeable problem about the ill-fated Flight 0992 was how to make sure old planes are fit to fly by standardising worldwide aircraft maintenance.
This generated a lot of controversy, but at the end of it, it was generally agreed that the age of an aircraft does not matter but ability to follow the rigorous safety schedule.
Although, new equipment are better because of their fuel efficiency, but the truth is that the newness does not in any way guarantee safety.
Another issue of concern is the inability to retrieve data from the Flight Data Recorder (FDR) due to post crash fire.
The Commissioner, Accident Investigation Bureau (AIB), Captain Muktar Usman, said the digital tape-based memory in the FDR succumbed to the post-crash fire, melted and prevented the recovery of data.
He, however, said that the Cockpit Voice Recorder is solid-based, contained 31 minutes of recordings of the last conversation between the flight crew and the control tower.
The disclosure initially got stakeholders worried, heightening fear that investigators may not get full conversation between the captain and the control tower.
The tragic story of Air France 447 teaches us that those even ultra-safe industries are still capable of breathtaking errors, and that the work of learning from mistakes and near misses is never done.
Air France 447 was the Rio de Janeiro to Paris flight that disappeared over the South Atlantic Ocean on June 1, 2009. Because the “black box” was not recovered during the initial searches, the only clues into how an Airbus 330 could plummet into the sea were 24 automatic messages sent by the plane’s flight computer to a computer system in Paris used for aircraft maintenance.
The messages showed that the plane’s airspeed sensor had malfunctioned and that the autopilot had disengaged.
With the black box seemingly unrecoverable (its acoustic pinger stopped transmitting after a few months, and the seabed near the crash site was more than two miles deep), the aviation industry steeled itself against the likelihood that the crash would remain a mystery forever.
Concerned about the fate of Dana and Bellview flight recorders, the Nigeria Civil Aviation Authority had last year mandated airlines to install Automated Flight Information Reporting System (AFIRS) on their aircraft or face sanctions.
The former Director General of NCAA, Dr. Harold Demuren, had said that each of the airline operators would have to install AFIRS, which is a safety device, with an initial down payment of $60,000.00 (N9.5 million), adding that the balance would be spread over a period of two years.
AFIRS is the newest safety gadget in the global aviation industry and could be used to detect any problem in any aircraft, whether stationary or airborne.
The equipment would enable the NCAA record and monitor abnormalities encountered by airplanes during flights from a remote centre, just as the new safety device would serve as a backup in the event of loss of data contained in aircraft’s black boxes.
The NCAA under Demuren had acquired the gadget, which had since been installed in its headquarters to serve as a back up.
Not a few believe that search and rescue system should be enhanced. While no one ever plans to get into trouble, the possibility of an emergency situation should be considered by all to save lives during emergencies.
It is on record that help came too late for some victims of the Dana accident. Lagos State Governor Babatunde Fashola at the unveiling of cenotaph for victims of Dana crash in Iju-Ishaga disclosed that 50 people could have been saved if help had come early. He said they died of suffocation.
Also worrisome was the issue of compensation that many agreed was not handled very well by the carrier, just as the drive of the aviation regulatory body to enforce payment seemed to have waned considerably in the past three months.
But in all of these, it still remained to be known what actually went wrong with Dana Flight 0992 that crashed in Iju-Ishaga, a Lagos suburb. Undoubtedly, the real challenge faced by Nigerian airline industry is to ensure safe and secure transportation of air passengers.
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