Is there a surprise in this?
Nigeria Airways was a very loyal customer of Boeing... until they swapped their 737s for A310s, and we all saw how that worked out!
Arik got a lot of free publicity over their massive order for new Boeings yet now they are switching horses in mid-stream to Airbus. Yes, and did you suppose they really would have taken delivery of all those new Boeings they had ordered?
I am a racist bigot of course, so that all of this looks like mismanagement verging on fraud to me. You would have hoped to see this company pay all its workers first and not last, laying a solid foundation for its operations. Instead here we have rumours of only one set of crew being paid on time and everyone else being forced to wait to see when the pay finally appears; a rather clear sign of a shaky operation. Yet there is far bigger money in there somewhere for new aircraft? Oh, really?
I am not an expert on this but there must be someone here who can tell us all about the mysteries of buying new Boeings or Airbuses and how you can get your piccy in the trade press, big smiles and handshakes all around, yet have no real money changing hands, just rather meaningless signatures (or in the case of some of these ogas, probably just a scrawled "X" with two witness signatures attesting to just which illiterate that was) on a piece of paper with no real expectation of a deal being done, just a vague hope that this dream will some day become a reality.
Just look back at the boasts in "Arikmetic" here and please tell me that those numbers are still valid. They might be; I don't know. You local guys, tell us what you know!