The Boeing MD-83 airliner that crashed into a crowded neighborhood in Lagos, Nigeria, on Sunday, killing all 153 on board, was once flown by Seattle-based Alaska Airlines.
BAMAKO, Mali — The crew of a Nigerian airliner that crashed into a crowded neighborhood in Lagos, Nigeria, on Sunday, killing all 153 on board, reported engine trouble just before the plane, once flown by Seattle-based Alaska Airlines, went down, an official said.
“Two engines were having problems,” Harold Demuren, director-general of the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority, said Monday. “That’s what he told the control tower.”
The aircraft, a Boeing MD-83 operated by Dana Airlines, was attempting to land after a flight from Abuja, the Nigerian capital, when it smashed into the side of a building near the Lagos airport, killing an unknown number of people on the ground, Demuren said.
Boeing bought the plane’s manufacturer, McDonnell Douglas, in 1997. It was a long-range variant in the popular MD-80 series, one of the most widely used plane types in the 1980s and 90s. Boeing stopped making them in 1999.
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The plane was exported to Nigeria in early 2009. It was first delivered in 1990 with the U.S. registration number N944AS to Alaska Airlines and had two minor incidents while in the Seattle-based airline’s service, according to databases of the Federal Aviation Administration and the Aviation Safety Network.
On Nov. 2, 2002, the plane made an emergency diversion because of smoke and an electrical smell in the cabin. On Aug. 20, 2006, the plane was evacuated after landing at Long Beach, Calif., because of smoke in the cabin.
Alaska Airlines spokesman Paul McElroy said the carrier did not sell the plane directly to Dana, but rather sold it to North Shore Aircraft and leased it back for a year. It returned the plane to North Shore Aircraft in August 2008, he said.
After the two smoke incidents, caused by chafing of wiring bundles in the plane, the aircraft was cleared to fly, McElroy said.
Boeing said in a statement on its website that the company is ready to provide technical assistance.
A widely followed Nigerian news website, Sahara Reporters, said Monday that the plane appeared to momentarily regain power just before crashing in the Ishaga neighborhood of Lagos, strewing wreckage over a wide area.
A leading Nigerian newspaper, The Guardian, quoted residents of the area as saying they heard loud vibrations and saw the plane buzzing low overhead before the crash.
Emergency crews wearing masks to protect themselves from the smoke and stench searched for bodies in a smoldering neighborhood near the Lagos airport Monday.
Apartment buildings, small businesses and roadside shops were smashed to bricks and rubble Sunday when the plane plowed into the area about five miles short of Lagos’ Murtala Muhammed International Airport.
By nightfall, searchers with police dogs recovered 137 bodies, including those of a mother cradling an infant, according to Nigeria’s National Emergency Management Agency.
Rescuers acknowledged they didn’t know how many people died in the wrecked apartments and smaller tin-roofed buildings along the narrow streets of Iju-Ishaga.
“The fear is that since it happened in a residential area, there may have been many people killed,” said Yushau Shuaib, a federal emergency-management spokesman.
Some U.S. citizens were aboard the flight, State Department spokesman Mark Toner said, but he could not provide a firm number. Others killed in the crash included at least four Chinese citizens, two Lebanese nationals and one French citizen, officials said.
Lagos state, home to 17.5 million people, has grown rapidly in recent years and soon will be home to one of the most populous cities in all of Africa. Massive migration and urban sprawl have brought residential neighborhoods to the boundaries of the airport.
With a proliferation of small regional airlines attempting to make up for the giant nation’s poor road network, apparent near-misses and borderline safety practices are common topics among air travelers in Nigeria, and it is not unknown for a pilot to calmly announce to passengers that they have missed their landing and must try again, or to begin singing over the intercom in midflight.
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.