Posted by Oluseto Olatuyi and Akin Olukunle on
Barely a week after an Air France aircraft collided with a herd of cattle at the Port Harcourt International Airport, Rivers State, another plane on Wednesday skidded off the runway of the Murtala Muhammed Airport in Lagos.
Barely a week after an Air France aircraft collided with a herd of cattle at the Port Harcourt International Airport, Rivers State, another plane on Wednesday skidded off the runway of the Murtala Muhammed Airport in Lagos.
The aircraft, a DC 10 marked DAS Cargo without any registration number, was said to have arrived at the airport during a downpour at 2pm.
The incident forced the Federal Airport Authority of Nigeria to close the runway for about three hours.
FAAN officials, including its Managing Director, Mr. Muhammed Umar and fire fighters, at about 5.55pm succeeded in pushing the aircraft off the runway ahead of investigation by men of the Accident and Investigation Prevention Bureau.
The runway was thereafter reopened, paving the way for the return to normal operations, particularly the take-off and landing of flights at the airport.
Chanchangi Airlines' flight, which was originally scheduled to leave Lagos for Abuja at about 2pm, was the first to be cleared by air traffic controllers for the trip at about 6.30pm.
The cargo aircraft incident makes it the third weather-related incident recorded in the last one month.
Others are the crash landing of an EAS Boeing 737-200 aircraft at the Jos Airport on June 11, 2005 and the skidding off of the runway of the Lagos airport by a Chanchangi Boeing 727-200 on June 12, 2005.
Meanwhile, the Nigeria Aviation Safety Initiative has called on FAAN to ensure that all runway surfaces have properly maintained drainage systems to prevent flooding.
NASI, in a statement on Wednesday, said such measure would prevent hydro planning, 'a probable causal factor in the Chanchangi incident of June 12."
It also called on FAAN and the Nigeria Airspace Management Agency to install low-level wind shear alerting systems in all Nigerian airports.
'The May 22, 1994 fatal DHC-6 accident in Lagos airport was attributed to wind shear. Eleven years later, no Nigerian airport has installed the required detection equipment," NASI lamented.
The Punch, Thursday, July 14, 2005