Executive Gaffe

The nation suffered a monumental embarrassment yesterday when the Minister of Air Transport, Felix Hassan Hyat and the Director General of the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA), Dr Harold Demuren, said earlier reports that wreckage of the missing 19-seater Beechcraft 1900D airplane had been found was false.

The minister had said, on Sunday evening, that the wreckage of the plane had been found in Iyalla Local Government Area of Cross River State.

Speaking to the press in Abuja on Monday, through the Chief Press Secretary of the Ministry of Air Transportation, Rhoda Iliya, the minister said that the information he earlier received from the NCAA and released to the press was false.

While regretting the misinformation, he advised that it be discarded as the search mission was still on.

The new position of the minister corroborates the statement made on Sunday by the Managing Director of Wings Aviation Limited, the owners of the plane, Capt. Nogie Meggison, that there was no expert identification of the crash site, as the AIB was yet to confirm the exact location.

He had said: “The AIB has communicated with the airline (Wings Aviation Limited) that the wreckage of the aircraft is speculated to be in Iyalla or Abakaliki area of Ebonyi State.

“The search and rescue operations, in respect of our missing aircraft, has been intensified with additional hands deployed around parts of Cross River State.”

Reports say some overzealous officials from the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) and some villagers, who were reportedly on the search train, located pieces of metals and hastily concluded that the rubble were scraps of the ill-fated airplane.

A call was put across to the minister and the NCAA boss, who just arrived from London. Later on, the news filtered out to the media that the wreckage had been found, which eventually turned out to be a hoax.