Nigerians demanded answers of their country's ramshackle aviation industry on Sunday after the latest in a series of airline crashes killed 107 people, including 71 children from a single Abuja school.
The death toll from the tragedy grew overnight as four of the seven passengers who were pulled alive from the wreckage lying strewn alongside the runway at Port Harcourt airport succumbed to severe burns, Police Commissioner Samuel Adetuyi said.
Archbishop John Onaiyekan of Abuja said that 71 of the dead were from the Loyola Jesuit College in Abuja, students aged between 11 and 18 who were traveling home to the southeast of the country to spend Christmas with their families.
Accident investigators have found the airliner's "black box" flight data recorders and were sending them to Lagos for analysis, said a spokesman for the Civil Aviation Authority, Sam Aduroboye.
The crash, which came just seven weeks after a similar disaster killed 117 people, sparked the fury of President Olusegun Obasanjo, the press and the victims' relatives. Many pointed to the poor safety record of Nigeria's motley crew of private airline operators.
"All Nigerian aircraft are flying coffins," wailed 24-year-old John Baligo, who came to Port Harcourt University Teaching Hospital to pick up the body of his elder brother but was sent away to find paperwork to prove his connection with the deceased.
Senior officials visiting the site of Saturday's disaster said the crowded Sosoliso Airlines DC-9 passenger jet appeared to have veered off the runway shortly after landing in heavy rain.
The plane apparently hit a drainage ditch and tore apart.
Transport minister Abiye Sekibo told reporters at the scene: "You can see that it hit this culvert. This is the reason for this accident. The man lost control because he hit this culvert."
Neither Saturday's crash nor the Oct. 22 disaster in which another airliner crashed in fields north of Lagos has been fully explained, amid mounting concern that Nigeria's aging passenger jets and shoddy airport infrastructure are no longer fit to carry travelers safely.
The latest tragedy brought the number of dead in 39 Nigerian aviation accidents since 1991 to 1,021, according to a tally of press reports. Several of the crashes remain unexplained, in some cases several years after they took place.
Obasanjo canceled a planned state visit to Portugal and ordered aviation officials and airline executives to meet him today in Abuja for emergency talks on safety for the country's aging fleet of privately owned airliners, his spokeswoman Remi Oyo said.
Speaking in Abuja, Archbishop Onaiyekan told the story of the schoolchildren's last flight.
"I have reliable information that at least 71 of our children in Loyola Jesuit College perished in that air crash," he said, adding that the airline had a special arrangement with Loyola College to fly the school party to Port Harcourt, where they were to be picked up by their parents.
"So, sadly, the parents were actually there at the airport and saw what happened. So you can imagine the great trauma for the parents watching their own children just roasting there," he said.
Medical aid agency Doctors Without Borders said that two of its workers were also among the dead.
RSS