The Commissioner and Chief Executive Officer, Accident Investigation Bureau (AIB) Engr. Akin Olateru has said that Ethiopian Airlines should had brought the black box of its crashed aircraft, B737- Max 8 to Nigeria to download and analyze instead of taking it to France.
Olateru made this known today while delivering his key note address at the opening of a two-day programme tagged: Review of Accident Investigation Bureau Regulations 2016 and Its Implications for Aviation Stakeholders, held at Radisson Blu Hotel, Ikeja, Lagos.
The AIB CEO who said the bureau has the state-of-the-art Flight Safety Laboratory (FSL) and skilled personnel to download and analyse the Flight Data Recorder (FDR) and Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) of any aircraft, regretted that a sister African country did not consult Nigeria before taking the Flight Data Recorder (FDR) and Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) of its crashed aircraft to France to download and analyse.
He said, “The Flight Safety Laboratory recently upgraded, in conjunction with the training of personnel on its capabilities, meets the evolving demands of accident investigation in line with international standard. The FSL is capable of simulating animations based on data from the Flight Data Recorders (FDR) and Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR). It is unfortunate that Ethiopian Airlines took the FDR and CVR of its crashed B737 – Max 8 to France for downloading and analyzing without consulting our FSL which can do the same thing perfectly”.
To buttress his claims, he said AIB is signing an MOU with France BAE on helping to investigate accidents and incidents in francophone West African countries.
The AIB boss who equally lamented that Nigerian Air Force (NAF) preferred to take the black boxes of aircraft abroad for analyses advised that the military should have a rethink in that direction since the nation could boast of one of the best Flight Safety Laboratories with the right caliber of personnel in the world.
He said the staff of the Bureau have under gone trainings in National Transport Safety Bureau, Lancaster University in United Kingdom and Transport Safety Bureau of Singapore
Meanwhile, the AIB’s CEO has said that the final reports on Delta Air’s serious incident and five other accidents would be published on April 25, 2019.
