Ten months after, the Accidents Investigation and Prevention Bureau (AIPB) has released its findings on the causes of the Sosoliso DC 9 plane crash, which killed 108 persons, including 50 students of the Loyola Jesuit College, Abuja.
The high point was that human factor- in this case- the decision of the crew, “to carry out a missed approach and the application of improper procedure while executing go-around” was a contributory factor. In other words, the accident was the consequence of the flight crew’s decision to continue the approach without having the runway and or the airport in sight.
Finding explanations as to why the Captain Adebayo-led crew would contemplate the terrible misjudgment instructively strikes at the heart of the afflictions plaguing the aviation scene. Unfortunately, we know that such blatant misjudgments are often the rule, rather than the exception in the industry.
Owing to years of progressive deterioration in aviation standards, pilots have increasingly come under pressure to take such deadly risks; they have had to rely more on intuition and subjective judgment in taking flight decisions in the absence of vital information from other professionals in the flight chain, with the practice becoming the standard operating procedure over time. We do acknowledge, for a fact, that in some cases, pilots are to blame for ignoring advice from air traffic controllers.
The report expectedly throws up afresh issues of the deplorable states of aviation infrastructure and poor management systems to explain why flying has become such a hazardous venture. For instance, the report identifies adverse weather conditions, with the ingredients of wind activity- linked with poor visibility in rain and thunderstorm as additional explanations for the crash, which obviously are beyond the control of the pilot and crew. However, considered together with the other findings of poor airfield lightings, and the existence of an exposed drainage concrete, which explains the shattering of the aircraft on impact- the disaster of December 10, 2005, appears to have been fated.
The summary is that the crew flew blind in a situation of extreme turbulence of weather, unaided by technology that the civilized world had long taken for granted, with their situation compounded by negligence and system ineptitude. The unbelievable factor of an exposed concrete drain in the precincts of the airport runway may appear like a fairy tale. But it mirrors the depth that things have sunk in the aviation sector.
We will continue to make the point that the crisis of our aviation industry is one of system disorder, which means that the solution must be holistic to be effectual. Virtually all the issues contained in the findings of this particular accident are what different stakeholders have highlighted at various fora to examine the ills plaguing the sector; hence, the issues are familiar to both the operators and the regulators alike. The vast disjunction between identifying the problems and doing something about them is what explains the state of the sector today.
The AIPB report is no doubt important in the on-going attempts to give the industry a face-lift. It presents the aviation authorities a checklist on what needs to be done and how far things have moved in the direction of addressing specific problems.
One instructive lesson in the report which needs to be emphasised is that it is time our aviation professionals returned to the path of true professionalism with its strict demands for safety and observance of standards. While the provision of aviation infrastructure is vital to the efforts to reposition the industry, the need to get operators and professionals to return to the age-long threshold of operating standards has become no less important. Enforcing this basic requirement is as much the job of the regulators as it is of the professional bodies themselves.
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