We’ve touched on the rusting carcasses of abandoned airliners littering Nigeria’s commercial airports before, and in 2013 it was reported that the country had been told to clean up its act – by cleaning up its aircraft boneyards. These photographs, captured at Benin City Airport in 2005 and 2010 respectively, are a good example of those scenes.
In past decades, Nigeria’s airports have become the final resting places for passenger aircraft whose operators have gone out of business for a variety of reasons, or simply put them out to pasture.
These images reveal the former Okada Air fleet of Boeing 727s and BAC-One Eleven 300s. In one image, 17 of the 18 BAC-111s acquired by the Benin City-based airline can be seen rotting away in a neglected corner of the commercial airport. With them is a larger, US-built 727, lingering on in an equally poor state of repair.
Okada Air was established in 1983 and had 18 BAC One-Eleven 300s on its booked by 1991. The following year saw the company launch a range of international services, but by 1997 Okada Air had ceased to exist. Its abandoned airliners were subsequently parked up and left to languish at Benin City for more than a decade.
Examining the scene via Google Earth, it appears that the abandoned airplanes had started to be consumed by the overgrown land around them, their moss-covered wings and fuselages virtually camouflaged from above.
Interestingly, in 2013 – the same year that Nigeria begun to clear its corroding aviation boneyards – only two BAC-111 passenger aircraft are understood to have still been in service worldwide. These are operated by US defence giant Northrop Grumman as airborne test beds for the long-awaited F-35 stealth strike fighter programme.
Because the ageing type’s flight certificate has now been withdrawn, Northrop’s BAC-111s are operated as “experimental” aircraft in the research and development role, surely making them among the oldest X-planes still in operation – at least, of those we know about.
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So, it is not only ‘dead’ computers, TVs, refrigerators, etc that are dumped in good ol’ Nija!!! Na wa.