Sosoliso Plane Crash-10 Years After

In memory of the departed souls: The innocent Children whose lives were cut short in their prime, may they continue to rest in peace. To their Parents who were left behind to mourn and bear the irreplaceable loss; May God continue to comfort them.

In the Facebook Post made by Captain Horace Millar- Jaja today he wrote;

“My number today is……10.
December 10th ..Ten years ago was the Sosoliso Airlines crash in Port Harcourt a DC9-32.
102 passengers plus 5 crew were on that flight .75 School children .from the School in Abuja .
We remember them today.for me ,my thoughts are with the Cookey gam, Ellah, Daniel Kalio
Amachree, families and the crew as I had worked with this airline and left 6 months before this crash.
My thoughts go out with all the other families as well ..on this anniversary of this horrible accident…….
The Good that came out of this
Aviation safety was given its priority …and the owners of that airline were not allowed to continue in aviation again. .Thanks to the Government at the time…”

How time flies…….

Sosoliso Airlines Flight 1145 was a scheduled flight between the Nigerian cities of Abuja (ABV) and Port Harcourt (PHC). At about 14:08 local time (13:08 UTC) on 10 December 2005, Flight 1145 from Abuja crash-landed at Port Harcourt International Airport. The plane, a McDonnell Douglas DC-9-32 with 110 people on board, burst into flames. Immediately after the crash, seven survivors were recovered and taken to hospitals, but it has since been reported that four of those survivors have died in hospital care, leaving three survivors, two of whom were flown to South Africa. In the end, two people survived.

The captain was Benjamin Adekunle Adebayo, a Nigerian. The first officer was Gerad Yakubu Andan, a Ghanaian.

The crashed DC-9 was owned by JAT Airways, and operated by Sosoliso Airlines Ltd.This is the first accident for the airline.

The accident occurred during approach to Port Harcourt in adverse weather – windshear, rain and lightning. Unable to make out the unlit runway through the rain, the captain called for a go around (missed approach) at an altitude of about 200 ft (approximately 120 ft above the ground). This call was made about 100 ft below the “decision altitude”. The missed approach procedure was carried out incorrectly, and the aircraft struck the ground approximately 70 meters left of the runway. It collided heavily with a concrete drainage culvert, disintegrated and caught fire.

Many passengers survived the initial impact and died in the resulting fire. Port Harcourt Airport had one fire truck and no ambulances.

All seven crew members and 101 of the 103 passengers died in the crash, or later from their injuries. The two surviving passengers were seriously injured.

Among the passengers were about sixty-one secondary school students from Loyola Jesuit College in the Federal Capital Territory region of Nigeria.At first Loyola Jesuit College students from Port Harcourt traveled between school and their homes via buses using the roads. Rising crime along roads during the 1990s made parents believe that road travel was too dangerous. In 2001, when Sosoliso Airlines began services between Port Harcourt and Abuja parents placed their children on the flights.

Among the victims were two volunteers for Medecins Sans Frontieres/Doctors Without Borders en route to work in Port Harcourt, Hawah Kamara and Thomas Lamy, as well as televangelist Bimbo Odukoya, pastor of the Fountain of Life Church, who succumbed to her injuries the day after the accident.

One survivor, Kechi Okwuchi, was treated in Milpark Hospital at Johannesburg, South Africa as of 14 December 2005 and at Shriners Hospitals for Children in Galveston, Texas, United States as of 6 September 2007.

Andy and Ify Ilabor, the parents of crash victims Chuka, Nkem, and Busonma “Buso” Ilabor, started a foundation called the Ilabor Angels to assist orphans and AIDS victims.

Loyola Jesuit dedicated a Memorial Hall to the deceased students.

The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) mandates that each family of an air crash victim is entitled to only 3 million naira or US$18,157 from the airline. In January 2009 Harold Demuren, the director general of the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA), said that the families of the air crash victims would be compensated and that Sosoliso had already paid $2.3 million into an escrow account to compensate the families.

Credit: Wikipedia