Asaba Incident: Aircraft’s black box data overwritten after crew flew back to Lagos

The Nigerian Safety Investigation Bureau (NSIB) has said critical data from the flight recorder of the private jet that landed on a road near Asaba Airport was overwritten after the aircraft was flown back to Lagos before investigators could take custody of it.

The Director-General of the NSIB, Alex Badeh, disclosed this on Friday during a virtual media briefing, saying the development would make it more difficult for investigators to reconstruct what happened during the unusual landing.

The incident involved a US-registered Bombardier Challenger 601-3A operated by VMO Aero Limited, which landed on a paved road near Asaba Airport in Delta State on 10 June instead of the designated runway.

The aircraft, which was flying from Lagos to Asaba under Instrument Flight Rules, was carrying four crew members and three passengers. No injuries were reported.

The crew later flew the aircraft back to Lagos before investigators arrived at the scene.

Mr Badeh said the return flight resulted in the flight recorder overwriting data that could have assisted the investigation.

He said the recorder was expected to have a longer recording capacity but, in this case, investigators recovered only about two hours of low-quality data.

“The rule allows them to have a 26-hour electric recorder but we discovered that it only recorded for about two hours of low quality,” he said.

He explained that because the aircraft had flown from Lagos to Asaba and then back to Lagos, the recorder had overwritten information from the period investigators were most interested in.

That has left investigators with less flight data from the aircraft’s movement around the time of the wrong-surface landing.

Mr Badeh, however, said the loss of the data would not end the investigation, adding that the bureau was using other methods to…