Crashed Dana plane -Flight was in distress 17 minutes after take-off

The engine of the Dana Air plane that crashed in Lagos was recently changed following a bird strike, the company told a coroner sitting at an Ikeja High Court, on Thursday.

At the ongoing inquest into the cause

of the June 3, 2012 crash that killed all 153 persons aboard, and an additional ten on ground, the company's Head of Corporate Communications, Tony Usideme, said the plane suffered a bird strike on April, 19 2010.

    

Usideme told the coroner, Alexander Komolafe, that the "engine of the aircraft was changed completely" following the damage to the engine that forced the plane to "make an emergency return" after take-off.

"It was an outbound flight from Lagos and it had to make an emergency return," he said, adding that he could not remember the plane's destination before the incident. "We had to change the engine because we could never jeopardise the lives of our passengers and crew that we value so much."

During cross-examination, Usideme however, denied knowledge of any crash landing by the aircraft on May 10, 2012 or delay in taking off from Lagos on May 23, 2012.

According to him, no aircraft would be allowed to fly if it failed to satisfy international safety standards, which in their case, was being regulated by the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) and other agencies.

Usideme also disclosed that the only person who could have stopped the crashed aircraft with registration number, 5N-RAM, from flying was a Captain Watson, who also died in the flight.

In his deposition, the Director of Engineering, Accident Investigation Bureau (AIB), Emmanuel Diala, presented a preliminary report on the crash.

The report stated that the first sign of trouble came 17 minutes after the plane was airborne at 2.58pm, following a "non-normal" engine condition.

A conversation between the First Officer (FO) and the Captain, as revealed by the Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) analysed in the US, showed a continued struggle to get the engines to function properly.

"At 1543:27 hours (3.43pm), the Captain informed the FO, ‘we just lost everything, we lost an engine. I lost both engines'. During the next 25 seconds until the end of the recording, the flight crew was attempting to restart the engines," the report stated.

Only fifteen percent of plane wreckage recovered

Diala also disclosed that only 15 percent of the crashed plane wreckage was recovered from the site for examination, due to "post-crash fire".

He, however, added that the agency recovered enough material needed for their investigation, while condemning crowd control management at the scene.

While being cross-examined, Diala told the coroner that investigation was still ongoing, deposing that the agency had relied on crew logbooks, perishable evidence from the site, flight data and cockpit voice recorders, among others, in the investigation.

It was a heated session in the courtroom, with intermittent interruptions by the counsels to Dana Air and NCAA, Bolaji Ayorinde and Babatunde Irukera, respectively, thereby delaying proceedings.

They objected to everything, from the line of questioning to the motive that behind the questions posed to the two witnesses.

For well over an hour, the lawyers were lost in legal jargon over the court's jurisdiction and that of AIB.

Reading the riot act

To that, the coroner read section 33 of the state coroner's law, which gave the court power to know the deceased and investigate the time, place and manner of death of the deceased in an accident.

"I think we have over-flogged this issue, as to 'this is where we can go, this is where we cannot go," he said.

At a point, the coroner, sensing reluctance in Usideme to answer some questions, threatened to invoke his power to imprison a witness.

"If I ask you a question and you don't answer me, you will go to prison," he said.

Following an objection and enduring protest from Ayorinde, the coroner later said he was merely making a statement of fact as stated in the state coroner's law.

Komalafe adjourned sitting to Monday, August 6, 2012, when further questioning of Diala will resume.