Tomorrow, June 3 will be exactly a year when a passengers' plane belonging to Dana Air, which took off from the Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport, Abuja and was heading to the Murtala Muhammed International Airport, Lagos, crashed, almost seven minutes before landing.
The aircraft, a twin-engine MD-83, registered in Nigeria as 5N-RAM which had on board 153 passengers, including seven crew members crashed into a two-storey building in the crowded neighbourhood of the Iju/Ishaga area of Lagos. After the unfortunate accident, President Goodluck Jonathan declared three days of national mourning.
The President noted that the crash had "sadly plunged the nation into further sorrow on a day when Nigerians were already in grief over the loss of many other innocent lives in the church bombing in Bauchi State".
He also pledged that "every possible effort" would be made to boost the nation's aviation safety. Dana Air set up a 24-hour hotline for relatives to call and added a message to its website reading, "Our thoughts and prayers are with the families of guests who were involved in the Dana Air mishap. May the souls of the deceased rest in peace."
It was indeed a black Sunday for the Nigerian people as it had on board some important dignitaries such as Levi Ajuonuma, the spokesman of Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) whom our reporter paid a visit to his Omodara Street, off Ajanaku Street, Awuse Estate Opebi, Ikeja Lagos residence.
The house was under lock and key. One hundred and fifty-three bodies were recovered from the site of the crash. Of that figure, the pathologists which conducted an inquest into the crash were able to identify the bodies of 148 persons.
These details were given in court when the Chief Medical Examiner and Consultant Pathologist of the Lagos State University Teaching Hospital (LASUTH), Prof. John Obafunwa, testified before a Coroner Court which sat at the Lagos High Court, Ikeja. Prof Obafunwa, who along with other experts conducted series of postmortem tests on the bodies recovered from the crash site, said a total of nine persons among the 153 persons aboard the plane could not be identified. He said the team of experts could not identify the bodies of the pilot and the co-pilot after exhaustive deliberation and consultation.
"Bodies of other crew members were, however, identified." He said apart from Waxtan, and Rathore, who were certain to be on the plane, the other seven names of passengers on the manifest whose bodies were not found, might actually not have boarded the plane.
The consultant testified that "it is either these individuals were not on board the plane or some other passengers used their names to get on board. "It is also possible some of them were completely incinerated," he added.
Then, according to Prof Obafunwa, among the 148 bodies identified with their names, three of them were identified through the DNA analyses carried out in the United Kingdom and the three were discovered to be among the bodies of those who died on the ground.
The Federal Government seized the licence of Dana Air and also banned the MD-83 aircraft type used by DANA after the crash. They also set up a nine-man technical and administrative panel that audited all airlines operating in the country. On September 5, 2012, the suspension of Dana Air's operating licence was lifted and the airline started recertification and retraining processes amidst public commendation from Labour, right activists, lawyers and relations of the Dana air crash victims which said it was premature.
The question today is that a year later, have the families of the victims been compensated with mandatory $100,000 compensation for air crash victims by the International Air Transport Association, IATA? Speaking during an interactive session with newsmen at the Muritala Muhammed airport, Lagos, Head of Corporate Communication, Dana Air, Mr Tony Usidamen, said that the airline was facing difficulties in paying full compensation to the families of the victims of the ill-fated plane owing to incomplete documentation, late submission of documents and multiple entries from relatives and internal wrangling among the families.
He, however, assured that the airline would ensure that those who had submitted documents were fully paid. As at May 24, only 11 of the 125 families of the victims of the Dana Air crash had received the full compensation of $100,000.
While saying 95 of the 125 families had received the initial payment of $30,000 (about N4.5m), he added that 21 of the families had just submitted documents from the Probate Registry to enable them claim full compensation.
He said that when the 21 families received the final payment of $100,000, the total number of families fully compensated would rise to 32. On the ground victims, Usidamen said that nine families were affected out of which seven had been given partial settlement while others two refused to collect the initial payment.
He stressed that Pastor Daniel Omowunmi, whose properties were destroyed and had demanded N500 million compensation but had also received initial payment of $30,000, adding that the airline and its insurance companies were still negotiating with the pastor. The Federal Government on Thursday, May 30 at the opening ceremony of the Aviation Safety Week 2013 organised by the ministry in Abuja reassured Dana Airline crash victims' families of its efforts at ensuring prompt payment of their insured claims to legitimate relations of the victims of the ill-fated aircraft.
However, Princess Stella Oduah said the past two years had witnessed remarkable transformation of the sector in terms of human capital and infrastructure capacity building, regulatory standards and technology-driven operations in furtherance of the Federal Government's commitment to make Nigeria's air space one of the safest in air transport operations globally.
Oduah, who expressed government's sense of loss and heartfelt commiseration with the bereaved families over the June 3, 2012 air crash in which over 153 lives were lost, said the Nigeria Civil Aviation Authority, NCAA, had worked closely with the management of the airlines and relevant insurance companies to ensure expeditious payment of claims to the families of the victims.
National Mirror