152-Passenger Airliner Crashes Into Apartment Building







The fire is pretty bad, as the aeroplane had just taken off from Lagos’ airport and it was full of fuel.

It was en route to the Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital in the centre of the country. Like Brasília in Brazil, Abuja is a planned city built to hold the country’s administrative centre from scratch. It became the official capital of the country in 1991, after construction begun in the 1980s. Lagos is still the largest city in Nigeria.

There’s no official cause for the crash yet, although witnesses say the plane hit a power line. If that’s true, it must have been on its way down, since the runway is not close enough to that part of the town. The weather conditions were good and visibility was 10+ kilometres.

Nigeria received a Category 1 status by the Federal Aviation Administration in 2010. That’s its top safety rating, awarded to countries that can fly aeroplanes directly into US airspace. [Tondan, Opeyemi Blog, HuffPo and USA Today]
