I missed seeing that one ....
But I showed up soon afterwards to do my Madame Defarge number just the same:
At one point the NAF (Nigerian Air Force) got some Hinds, the export version without the chin turret. Mi-25? Just the thing for restoring order to the Niger Delta, except for the way that the Nigerian government in large part was behind such things as illegal bunkering.
Shell had built a new airfield at great expense at Osubi, near Warri. One peculiar design feature was that there was a single taxiway joining the runway to the ramp that split into two, using 90º angles. The center section at the edge of the ramp was reserved for fire engines, and it was flanked by deep, open monsoon ditches.
I had asked the Scottish Dwarf, in charge of Osubi, about this, whether it might be a good idea to either cover the ditches or at least put some sort of visual barriers there to prevent some unaware crew from taxying into one of the ditches. Drawing himself up to his full height, 1.3 meters, he told me that Shell had put out a notice not to go into the ditches which "everyone had read," so that was that and me told!
One day these two things, the Hinds and the open monsoon ditches, came together in a near-perfect way.
Some of the Hinds had stopped off at Osubi to refuel. I think it was a flight of three. When they were ready to depart, the last one was lagging a bit behind, so that instead of doing this time-consuming "turn left, turn right" thing that the lead aircraft had done, the pilot took a short-cut, angling straight toward the exit onto the runway, and right into a monsoon ditch. (I guess he hadn't read the Dwarf's notice.) To begin with the Hind had only dropped its nosewheel into the ditch, which was bad enough. The pilot decided to save the situation by pulling some pitch though, and then all hell broke loose, ending in one of those roll-overs. One main rotor blade even made it clean over the rather large terminal building to land out in the parking lot on the other side.
I have no idea how this works, but nobody died when that Hind came apart and scattered big pieces of itself in that way. On the other hand, I was told by one of my spies that when the Nigerians tried to put in a warranty claim with the Russians for repairs to their almost-new helicopter they got nowhere with that.
Another time the Nigeria Police Force Air Wing wrote off an almost-new Bell 412 by trying to fly it with the "low fuel" warnings showing steadily since lift-off, crashing it on the taxiway at Port Harcourt International. Most of the tail was torn off, and the rest of the wreckage was there with the skids all spread out and torn off, and the main rotors either ripped off or else shredded: something like $1.5 million gone to hell. It was interesting to look at, that wreck, because I had always wondered about how they built those new-style main rotors, and what the gear boxes at the tail looked like, the 42º and the 90º, when here was a real helicopter sort of "exploded" just like in the illustrations in my Big Book of Helicopters. Thanks, NPF Air Wing!