Arik Air 075 Ahead of Incident Plane Diverted
 

Arik Air 075 Lagos - Accra which was on approach ahead of the incident plane encountered low level weather and micro bursts abandoned approach and diverted to Lagos.

A friend of mine resigned from Allied few months ago. 4 aircraft, 4 First Officers. Do the math.

About a year ago I took off from Accra to return directly back to London, about 20 minutes later due to quite bad tech issues I decided to return back to Accra.

The ATC were very helpful and professional and cleared the sky for me to dump fuel, descend at my discretion and make a direct and immediate return. They also offered me immediate track and distance information back to Accra and other airfields.

I'm not saying its perfect, but my experience of Accra ATC was very impressive, when back on the ground I thanked the controller for his help.

Let us therefore not be too hard on any people involved in this tradegy until we know the facts.

As Stressfree states, there is nothing wrong with ATC or runway at Accra.

I heard from a well-placed source in Accra last week that the aircraft was found to have very little fuel in its tanks.

Accra has cheap fuel by regional standards, so it is common for commercial aircraft to uplift regulatory minimum fuel at their departure airport and to tank at Accra. The flight also apparently had a lot of bad weather en-route.

One scenario under investigation is that the aircraft used more fuel than planned en-route due to Wx, and the captain preferred to continue on a non-stabilised approach rather than risk a go-around with very low fuel.

This R /W is shown as having CAT2 ILS was it working?

On the night in question the ILS was serviceable, after the B727 ran off the end it was not, and remains not.

Three years on ...
 

Where is the Accident report ?????

Nigerian aviation
 

I suppose this won't last long but here goes anyway.
Back in the 80s I was involved in sales and hire of broadcast television hardware, based in London. I had quite a few Nigerian customers. One common factor amongst them was that they didn't trust The System to repay their VAT. So I usually offered to run them and their purchases (which could be very heavy and bulky) out to Heathrow for the 2100 Nigerian Airways flight to Lagos from T3 and to physically present the hardware to Customs in order to get the export forms stamped (I hadn't charged the VAT). Customs would usually come down to meet me at the NA check-in - where, every time, there were at least half the passengers doing "private deals" with the check in staff (ie bribing them to undercharge/under-weigh their luggage).

One day one of the Customs guys said to me "I sometimes wonder how this flight gets off the runway every night, there's so much undeclared baggage on board." On that occasion we'd checked in a projection TV system the size of a small car.

Of course this has nothing to do with the crash in question and I imagine nothing like this ever happens these days. Does it?

Loadsheet (manual) in those days used to be signed and thrown away. Good practice was to then look out the side window at pax boarding (no airbridge at domestic terminal), and then adjust take-off weight accordingly.

One chap was struggling to load his "hand luggage" in the overhead. Closer inspection revealed a car engine block; must have weighed a good 20 kgs, as opposed to the manifested 7 kg.....

Derate take-off on the 737? No such thing. EGT nudging redline most days. First you knew of your actual take off weight was usually on take off.