The stories in Monday’s dailies about a purported incident involving rri Air’s Sunday Accra-Banjul flight which had the national U-23 team on board painted grossly erroneous pictures of the flight.
We will like to state for the records that the U-23 team and other passengers on board the aircraft were never in danger of an air accident. Against the reports in the dailies, none of the aircrafts in question lost a tyre on landing in Accra and neither did any of the planes lose an engine.
The facts are as follow:
The aircraft that was conveying the team to Banjul had a stopover in Accra, Ghana. On ground Accra, the Captain, while on routine walk around the aircraft as part of the airline’s safety procedure, noticed that one of the tyres had a low pressure (not flat). Instead of keeping the team in Accra longer than necessary, we had to deploy another aircraft that was on a night-stop in Accra to take the team to Banjul. The Captain of this aircraft was airborne when he had to make an air return due to a gear pin in-situ.However, our standard operating procedure required the aircraft to be re-certified by our maintenance partner, Lufthansa Technik before it could continue with the flight to Banjul.
We then had to fly in Lufthansa engineers from Lagos to change the low pressure wheel on the original operating aircraft for it to fly the team and other passengers to Banjul. The other aircraft were also examined and released
The safety of passengers is paramount in our operations and we will not compromise this for anything.
The Nigeria Football Federation has already issued a statement to correct the erroneous impression that the team nearly had an air crash.
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