Plane leaving Nigeria for Gabon goes missing

A four-seater plane flying from Nigeria to Gabon via Cameroon has disappeared, Cameroon aviation sources have said.

Owned by the US company, Global Aviation, the plane took off from Kano in northern Nigeria at 1800 hours on Monday en route Libreville in Gabon, where it was scheduled to arrive at 2300 hours, after a stopover in Douala, Cameroon.

However, the station said that the plane, with only the American pilot on board, did not make it to Douala.

It said the last contact the plane had with the control tower took place in Mongo, which is two hours flight from the Cameroonian economic capital.

Search-and-rescue operations led by Cameroon’s civil aviation authorities have yielded no result.

Meanwhile, managing director of the Nigerian Airspace Management Agency (NAMA), Mr. Ibrahim Abdulsalam, has said the agency cannot act on the disappearance of the plane because it did not occur within the jurisdiction of the agency.

“The aircraft had been handed over to the Cameroon airspace authority before the incident occurred within their airspace,” he said.

“It did not occur within the Nigerian airspace, so there is nothing we can do about it.”

A similar but more tragic plane disappearance occurred on  March 8, 2014, when a Boeing 777-200 Malaysian Airlines plane conveying 239 people departed Kuala Lumpur International Airport at 12:41 a.m. and was expected to land in Beijing at 6:30 a.m., a 2,300-mile (3,700km) trip, but it never arrived.

More than three months of intense search for the plane has yielded no result, and the airline’s British commercial chief, Hugh Dunleavy, has now admitted that the search could even last “decades”.

Aboard that flight were 154 Chinese and Taiwanese, 30 Malaysians, 5 Indians, 7 Indonesians, 6 Australians, 3 Americans, 4 French, 2 New Zealanders, 2 Ukrainians, 2 Canadians, and 1 Russian, Italian, Dutch and Austrian.