Posted by By David Blair, Africa Correspondent on
A British colonel told yesterday how he saw the left engine of a Nigerian airliner explode with an orange flash, hours before an identical aircraft from the same carrier crashed killing all 117 people on board.
A British colonel told yesterday how he saw the left engine of a Nigerian airliner explode with an orange flash, hours before an identical aircraft from the same carrier crashed killing all 117 people on board.
Col Nick Luck, who is based in Sierra Leone, was a passenger on a Bellview Airlines Boeing 737. He was flying from Sierra Leone's capital, Freetown, to Banjul in Gambia when the explosion occurred.
"There was a really loud bang, like a gunshot going off right by your head," he said. "The whole left side of the aircraft was lit up by a great orange flash coming out of the engine."
After the explosion, the engine did not catch fire and Col Luck found indifference when he approached the cabin crew. "I said to one stewardess 'you ought to report that'. She looked at me blankly.''
When the aircraft landed Col Luck tried to persuade the airport staff to have the 737 examined. "Eventually I was led over to some chap in a blue uniform."
"I said, 'I've just flown in that aircraft and there's been a bloody great explosion and I'm not convinced the crew are going to do anything about it. You ought to get an engineer to look at it'. He just said, 'yes, yes', without even taking my details," said Col Luck, 40, from London, who serves in the Royal Logistics Corps.
This was at about 2pm on Oct 22. Seven hours later a Bellview 737 plunged into the ground outside Lagos, Nigeria's commercial capital. Col Luck's travel agent in Sierra Leone has informed him that his plane was the 737 that crashed.
Bellview has not said whether the 737 was in Banjul before the accident. But it has emerged that the 24-year-old aircraft had aborted take-offs twice this year, once when an engine caught fire.