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Subscribe to RSSA plane with about 150 passengers landed on a two-story building in a suburb of Lagos, Nigeria. NBC's Rohit Kachroo reports.
LAGOS, Nigeria -- A commercial airliner crashed into a densely populated neighborhood in Nigeria's largest city on Sunday, killing all 153 people on board and others on the ground in the worst air disaster in nearly two decades for the troubled nation.
Rescue officials said they fear many more people may have perished on the ground. The airline involved said an investigation had begun into the cause of Sunday's crash.
A Nigeria Red Cross report said 110 bodies had been recovered, with more being dug out from the rubble. A U.S. official said American citizens had been aboard the flight.
The pilots reported engine trouble before the plane fell out of the sky on a clear afternoon, smashing into businesses and crowded apartment buildings near Lagos' Murtala Muhammed International Airport. The flight was bound for Lagos, Nigeria's commercial center, from Abuja, the capital. Two years ago, the same MD-83 lost engine power due to a bird strike, according to an aviation database.
"The fear is that since it happened in a residential area, there may have been many people killed," said Yushau Shuaib, a spokesman for Nigeria's National Emergency Management Agency.
PhotoBlog: Smoldering scene in Lagos, Nigeria after plane crash
The cause of the Dana Air crash remained unknown Sunday night, as firefighters and police struggled to put out the flames around the wreckage of the Boeing MD83 aircraft. Authorities could not control the crowd of thousands gathered around to see the crash site, with some crawling over the plane's broken wings and standing on a still-smoldering landing gear.
Harold Demuren, the director-general of Nigeria's Civil Aviation Authority, said all on board the flight were killed in the crash. Lagos state government said in a statement that 153 people were on the flight traveling from Nigeria's central capital of Abuja to Lagos in the nation's southwest.
The flight's pilots radioed to the Lagos control tower just before the crash, saying the plane had engine trouble, a military official said. The official spoke on condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to speak to journalists.
Rescue officials feared many others were killed or injured on the ground, but no casualty figures were immediately available. Firefighters and local residents were seen carrying the corpse of a man from one building, its walls still crumbling and flames shooting from its roof more than an hour after the crash.
President Goodluck Jonathan later declared three days of national mourning in Africa's most populous nation.
The aircraft appeared to have landed on its belly into the dense neighborhood that sits along the typical approach path taken by aircraft heading into Lagos' Murtala Muhammed International Airport. The plane tore through roofs, sheared a mango tree and rammed into a woodworking studio, a printing press and at least two large apartment buildings in the neighborhood before stopping.
'Huge explosion'
Most people in Lagos' Agege suburb -- where the crash occurred -- live in tin-roofed buildings along unpaved streets.
"We heard a huge explosion, and at first we thought it was a gas canister," said Timothy Akinyela, 50, a local newspaper reporter who was watching a soccer match on TV with friends in a nearby bar.
A white, noxious cloud rose from the crash site that burned onlookers' eyes, as pieces of the plane lay scattered around the muddy ground.
While local residents helped carry fire hoses to the crash site, the major challenges of life in oil-rich Nigeria quickly became apparent as there wasn't any water to put out the flames more than three hours later. Some young men carried plastic buckets of water to the fire, trying to douse small portions. Fire trucks, from the very few that are stationed in Lagos state with a population of 17.5 million, couldn't carry enough water. Officials commandeered water trucks from nearby construction sites, but they became stuck on the narrow, crowded roads, unable to reach the crash site.
The dead included at least four Chinese citizens, the official Chinese news agency Xinhua reported late Sunday, citing Chinese diplomats in Nigeria. Officials at the Chinese embassy in Nigeria could not be reached for comment by the AP.
The spokesman for the Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation, Levi Ajuonuma, was also among the dead, according to a passenger list released by the airline. Ajuonuma was also de facto spokesman for the oil minister in OPEC member Nigeria, Africa's biggest crude producer.
Endemic corruption
Nigeria, home to more than 160 million people, suffers from endemic government corruption and mismanagement. The nation also has a history of major aviation disasters, though in recent years there hasn't been a crash. In August 2010, the U.S. announced it had given Nigeria the Federal Aviation Administration's Category 1 status, its top safety rating that allows the West African nation's domestic carriers to fly directly to the U.S.
But many travelers remain leery of some airlines. On Saturday night, a Nigerian Boeing 727 cargo airliner crashed in Accra, the capital of Ghana, slamming into a bus and killing 10 people. The plane belonged to Lagos-based Allied Air Cargo.
Officials with Lagos-based Dana Air did not respond to calls for comment Sunday night. The airline has five aircraft in its fleet and runs both regional and domestic flights. Local media reported a similar Dana flight in May made an emergency landing at the Lagos airport after having a hydraulic problem.
Nigeria has tried to redeem its aviation image in recent years, saying it now has full radar coverage of the entire country. However, in a nation where the state-run electricity company is in tatters, the power grid and diesel generators sometimes both fail at airports, making radar screens go blank.
Sunday's crash appeared to be the worst since September 1992, when a military transport plane crashed into a swamp shortly after takeoff from Lagos. All 163 army soldiers, relatives and crew members on board were killed.
'Oh God, we lost him'
The crash also comes as Nigeria, which became a democracy in 1999 after years of military rule, faces increasing sectarian bloodshed across its largely Muslim north from a radical Islamist sect known as Boko Haram. Earlier Sunday, a suicide car bomber killed at least 15 people and wounded dozens of others.
As night began to fall Sunday, more and more worried relatives of passengers arrived in the neighborhood, pushing their way down the crowded, narrow streets to make it to the crash site. One man stopped to ask about the crash, whether any passengers walked away alive.
His eyes grew wide when he heard no one escaped alive, his hand rising to his mouth. His brother was onboard.
"Oh God, we lost him," the man whispered, before slowly walking away.
The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
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Leave a Comment:
I hate airplanes
Why is that? Do you hate cars too?
I fail to recognize the comparison other than being of different modes of transportation. That's like saying if I don't like peanuts, I must hate oranges too. They are both food but otherwise very different. Thus one can hate airplanes and still like cars.
Though planes are safer than cars, I can see how it would be frightening. A metal tube that is 35,000 ft. in the air and going 500 mph doesn't seem like it should actually be able to stay up.
Sorry, I wasn't trying to be facetious. The comparison depends on why you don't like airplanes. Because you commented on this particular article about a crash, I inferred that it's based on your perception of safety (or lack thereof). Statistically, driving in a car is orders of magnitude more dangerous than flying, but I do understand that people have issues with the confinement and lack of control that airplane travel represents (regardless of the numbers).
@ccmnxc:
Yet many decades of flying experience prove otherwise. Bernoulli figured out how it works centuries ago.
What a sad day for the families and friends of this crash victims. Please pray for Nigeria and it people. a tragedy is a tragedy no matter where you are in this universe. is never about third world or first world however we find ways to improve our selves and learn from our past mistakes.
ONLY 153 i would have thought many more..................................
imrig
That was how many that was on the aircraft. I'm sure it will take a while to figure out how many on the ground died.
This tragedy, together with the crash of a cargo plane onto a bus in Ghana, are the consequences of budget minded airlines using vintage planes like MD-9 that should well be retired from services.
There's nothing wrong with them - if they're maintained properly. The problem is this: These planes become more expensive to operate, both due to cost of repairs as well as the fact that they are gas hogs. That's why other airlines got rid of the in favor of new, more efficient planes. If the airlines that acquire these older planes take short cuts, then all bets are off....
Real plane crashes serve to demonstrate the ludicrous yarn that was peddled, successfully, relating to the purported crashed here in the USA on "911", which is a BIG LIE that continues serving the interests of the extractive elites.
Woop2012, conspiracy theorists like you add to the pain of those who lost loved ones in that tragedy. Grow up, or go somewhere else to post your nonsense.
It's not conspiracy theory, it's fact. You need to pull your arse out of your behind, and stop trying to quash unpleasant information.
How sad and pathetic. I suppose you also think that the moon landings were faked...
Moon landings, who said anything about moon landings, my point was straightforward: evidence revealed pursuant to the 911 tragedy doesn't support the official narrative, forensically speaking.
When a disparate comparison is introduced into a thread, it suggests to me disinformation, and/or propaganda.
As for making it harder on survivors: the JERSEY GIRLS, losing husbands in the attack, NEVER bought into the fake narrative, and were instrumental in having the Tom Kean panel invoked, but little good did that whitewash commission do to really serve this great country.
Your point was stupid and based on fantasy. And speaking of disparate comparisions, your's fits the bill. The article was about the crash in Nigeria - you were the one who brought up the 9/11 conspiracy theory. And you're right - it suggests, no in fact screams disinformation/propaganda. Perhaps you should go to one of your conspiracy theory sites; nobody here cares what you have to say about 9/11.
Hope they wired the $24 million before they took off....
If both engines failed at the same time I wonder if fuel contamination was the culprit?
What makes you think that both engines failed?
$24 million, hell. I hope the 7 goats I just bought that were on that plane survived. One of them is my wife.
@ Gumps, show me wreckage at Shanksville, that is, demonstrate with evidence your position that a plane crashed at that field, before more name-calling on your part?
You won't, because you can't.
Okay Genius, you admit that a commercial flight filled with people is no longer with us, right? So where did the plane and the people go? Into the Twilight Zone? There was wreckage tinybrain...
I'm not the genius here. But, I can look at a crime scene, and rule out certain causal mechanisms. For example, I can rule out an airplane crash at Shanksville. What happened to the putative plane and passengers, I am not in a position to say, since I took no part in either the planning nor execution of the plot.
Show me wreckage that evidences a large commercial aviation disaster, which you ( or anyone) is unable to provide.
Here's the idea: you can't prove a LIE......this is the basic paradigm of that heinous criminal act, and other false stories.
A LIE CAN'T BE PROVEN! BINGO!
Now, your turn to respond with disinformation, and ad hominen attacks.....