The Bush Telegraph...
It is a funny thing, but sometimes you get very authoritative inside information hot from the bush telegraph right after a crash that turns out just not to be so. I think that people just like to make themselves important by being listened to, whether they really know what happened or not.
How often do you read about some eye-witness in the US or the UK finally being charged with wasting the time of the police after sending them off on a wild goose chase? To fill my shell-like ear with nonsense in a bar after hours is much less risky than that, and I always try to bear that in mind.
I was flying a Twotter at the time of the ADC crash, when I was even slightly involved in looking for floating wreckage on the lagoons before the crash site was finally established.
In a bar (where else) I heard precise and detailed stories about one ADC captain refusing to fly that 727 after an engineer had poured lots of hydraulic fluid into a leaking system at Port Harcourt, so that another captain took over the aircraft for the fatal flight. Then they lost the hydraulics and went into lawn-dart mode.
Then there was another story about how the elevator or the horizontal stabiliser came off.
And the one that turned out to be true seemed to be the most far-fetched, that the crew got a TCAS alert, when the F/O, Pilot-Flying, made a turn to avoid but kept banking and rolled the A/C over on its back, so that it went in vertically from 15 thousand + feet at close to Mach 1.
The strangest thing was the reaction of the search teams, when they abandoned the search just when they had supposedly got the equipment finally in place for recovery. That was very weird, and the local papers didn't let out a peep.
I fully agree that we need to know what went on so that we can avoid making the same mistakes twice. But in Nigeria there are so many loose ends. You just cannot, try as you might, divorce the way we fly from the way we live. Cars without lights, cars without seatbelts, roads without markings, airports without full lighting or signage. (How often have I had a quiet laugh when a night-time Lagos transient is told to 'Report at Link 4,' when I think to myself, 'Good luck finding it, new boy!') It's all one big mess.
Jerry Agbey-Egbe was about the only guy on the local scene willing to go public over a lot of aviation safety issues. There is still a lot of disquiet over the manner of his death; was he really shot by robbers at random? I guess we shall never get an answer to that.
I think there is simply too much pressure to continue doing things in the old, established way. Rarely, people come into the system who really do try to make positive changes. But that goes against the accepted, age-old ways of getting along. And Nigeria is not alone in this; think about how often we see discussions about the Asian fear of 'loss of face' and the role of that in accidents.
It shiouldn't be the way it is, but this isn't a perfect world. It comes down to accepting the environment for what it is and then trying to make the best of it. I try to keep a positive attitude and encourage a pro-safety way of operating without ending up tilting at windmills.
How often one sees someone come out for one or two tours in Nigeria before they flounce off to denounce the whole aviation scene as unsafe, insane, unfair or whatever. (Mr Ebullient comes to mind, somehow.) Well, aviation is inherently unsafe! Every time you get in and set things to turning and burning you are taking a risk. It's just a matter of not trying to juggle too many balls at once, I guess.
If it is any consolation, I had a job in Miami, Florida for an outfit run by a bottom feeder's bottom feeder. I was lower than a snake in a wagon rut. You know how we cheer ourselves up by saying, 'Well, there is always someone worse off than me.' That was me! I used to come in at midnight with the A/C needing a 100-hour inspection and come back out at 0700 to find a sticker on the instrument panel stating that had been done. What, by the shoe-maker's elves? Where was the FAA in this? And if I had complained, who do you think would be in trouble? Doh! I did my hours, got my ATPL and made tracks out of there!
Terms and conditions in Nigeria were found to be ten times better than back there in the good old USA. Otherwise, why would I still be here? I am with you in trying to make some constructive complaints but Nigeria's not the only place with problems. The trick is finding the balance, yes?