The Delta airline engine fire which occurred on the 13th of February 2018 has been blamed on a crack in one of the fuel nozzles of the aircraft.
The Alanta bound A330-200 flight from the Murtala Mohammed International airport, Lagos took off around 10.50pm and returned in less than an hour calling for emergency landing.
At a news conference in Lagos, the AIB Commissioner, Mr. Akin Olateru said the result on the aircraft engine which was flown out of the country to the US revealed that one of the aircraft fuel nozzles was badly damaged.
“We released the preliminary report, the small thing that can of slowed us down a little bit, it was a controlled engine fire, the engine has to go back to shop to do some analysis on it to find what actually caused it, we don’t have that facility in Nigeria, so that engine has been flown back to the US engine shop”.
Mr. Olateru explained that the engine had to be taken out because the AIB do not have the facility to adequately carry out the examination on the aircraft engines.
He said the Bureau had to solicit the assistance of its counterpart in the US, the National Safety Transportation Board, NTSB to join in the examination of the aircraft engines.
“we nominated the NTSB to be part of that, the report just came back last week, we found what actually caused it was that there crack in one of the fuel nozzles that was what caused the engine fire, so we are working hard on that, we will I mean Delta too is very, very cooperative that should be concluded very soon”.
The AIB commissioner had assured that the final report into the incident would be ready soon.
Olateru explained the processes in accident investigation, “Iwill take you through our processes, the way we do our work we investigate accidents, for example, like the American a Delta airline, because the state of occurrence was Nigeria that is why we are the one investigating but the accident investigation bureau of the operator, the aircraft manufacturer, the engine manufacturer, they have a right to participate,the airline themselves has a right to participate”.
“Now when you put all that together, one you are not working alone at the end of all that we do what they call general review, so say for instance we have two to three people on this investigation they’ve done and then they throw it open we have Abuja, we put all our investigators maybe about ten or twelve in a room and then, they project page by page. While they are doing that, we then bring in industry experts to sit with our team to do that review.
He added,”How do we pick those industry experts? Say for instance, the Associated One that crashed right here in Lagos, when we did the review in December, we brought in Captain a Kiddie Dare was one of the people that came as external faculty, why because he has flown that aircraft, he has about 6000-7000 hours flying turboprop, so that’s how we draw industry experts to guide us, many times we have brought in NCAA to be part of us to help us because there is no point you issuing a safety recommendations that doesn’t make sense, so this is why we go through series of processes before and when you are done with all these you then release it for 60 days, that 60 days you then release to all the stakeholders including the engine and aircraft manufacturers, for their comments, you give a 60 day win do with their comments, their are several checks to attract anything if there is anything there that may not work, so its a very painstaking process to investigate an accident”.
