A veteran American pilot has been barred from operating in Nigerian airspace after his aircraft mistakenly landed on a road under construction near Asaba Airport in Delta State, an incident that has rattled Nigeria’s aviation industry and drawn in multiple government agencies.
The Nigeria Civil Aviation Authority confirmed the sanction on Wednesday, with Director General Captain Chris Najomo announcing that the pilot in command has been removed from flight duties and permanently banned from flying within Nigerian airspace, pending the outcome of an ongoing investigation. The first officer on the flight has also been suspended, and the aircraft itself, a 1988 Bombardier Challenger 601 with US registration N989BC, has been grounded, with its Permit for Non-Commercial Flight suspended.
Speaking to journalists on the sidelines of the Airport Business Summit in Lagos, Najomo, who has more than four decades of flying experience himself, admitted he struggled to make sense of how a trained pilot could confuse a stretch of roadway for a runway. He said investigators would not rule out any possibility, including whether factors beyond pilot error played a role in the incident.
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The saga began on June 10 when the chartered jet, operated by Nigerian firm VMO Aero Limited, took off from Lagos bound for Asaba International Airport carrying four crew members and reportedly no passengers. As the aircraft approached Asaba, broken cloud cover and poor visibility obscured the runway. The pilot aborted his first approach after the runway environment appeared shifted from the aircraft’s actual flight path, then circled back for a second attempt. Cockpit accounts have since diverged sharply. While the flight crew maintained that their instruments showed correct alignment and that the runway was in sight before touchdown, an observer on board contradicted that version, stating the aircraft was still inside cloud cover deep into the approach and that the plane’s terrain warning system had repeatedly blared alerts to pull up before the jet came down on a concrete expressway near Ogwashi-Uku.
What turned a rare landing mishap into a full-blown national controversy was what happened next. Rather than staying put and notifying air traffic control, the crew reportedly took off again without clearance and flew on to Lagos, only radioing controllers after becoming airborne. Investigators say Asaba Tower tried repeatedly for nearly two hours to reach the aircraft, with the effort complicated by a faulty voice recording system at the tower.
The Nigerian Safety Investigation Bureau initially led the probe and recovered the plane’s cockpit voice and flight data recorders before handing the regulatory side of the case to the NCAA. The Department of State Services has since joined the investigation, a move officials say reflects how seriously security agencies are treating the episode. Questions have also emerged over the pilot’s age, with reports indicating he is well past the 65 year commercial flying limit under Nigerian aviation rules, though the NCAA has argued that because the aircraft carries US registration, American authorities hold primary jurisdiction over crew licensing.
For now, both pilots remain barred from Nigerian skies as authorities work to determine exactly what went wrong, and whether the explanation is as simple as a missed approach or points to something far more troubling.
