In 2009, I boarded an Afriqiyah Airliner from Tripoli to Sirte, all in Libya. In the journey, as l looked at the passengers, I played the devil’s advocate in mind.
Midair, we are told not to entertain fears but I was resilient in my spirit and consciously put myself in alert mode. “If this plane should fall down, a whole number of dignitaries will be gone,” I said to myself. It was an AU summit time with its concomitant assembly of people.
Again, in the same year, I was on a flight from New Jersey, United States to Venezuela. The lead pilot of the 4 and a half hours flight was a 31 year old Brazilian.
He sometimes left the cockpit to the general cabin to converse with the dignitaries on board. I felt a bit uneasy he was not behind the “steering wheel” of the airplane.
There, someone brought me to the realization that the airplane was on auto pilot and it was safe. Despite a major tossing in the air just as we took off from New Jersey, he steered the flight smoothly.
Early on, in 2002, a visit to DR Congo whose contents I have fond memories of, got a fly in the perfume bottle.
This was the report that, the army plane had developed a fault and that the crew had sent for a new part at home, to be delivered by Kenya airways. That part was brought in, fixed on the propeller plane, and off we moved on our return journey.
I have taken a military flight from the Ivory Coast heading to Accra in which the plane dashed back to the place of departure, ostensibly because fuel shortage was imminent midstream of the journey. Occupants were warned to evacuate quickly upon landing since the supposed shortage could let the plane explode.
On my way to attend an event in Iran, I was glued to the flight path, knowing very well that my destination was mired in a volatile region. The pilots stayed clear of Syria. They moved to Azerbaijan before heading to Iran.
My experiences are uncountable but at this juncture I am departing them to dive into other examples. Among these, the scariest one perhaps, was the Malaysian Flight MH370 that on March 8, 2014, was journeying Kuala Lumpur-Beijing. It disappeared from radar and remains a mystery.
Paragraph one introduces us to the safety concerns when dignitaries are packed in one place. Paragraph two is a point that runs counter to the argument that a younger age represent lack of adequate preparation or expertise for flying an aircraft.
We have been told over and over again that Flight Lieutenant Jerry John Rawlings, Ghana’s only leader who was a pilot flew Heads of State prior to the military coup which brought him to power in 1979. At the time he was aged 31, just months to 32.
My third paragraph speaks to the lack of control by passengers who have no choice but must shuttle on flights with very little knowledge of the technicalities involved. Willy nilly, when we boarded the aircraft, I was lost in thoughts whether test flights had been conducted after replacement of the faulty part.
Paragraph four highlights the use of sound discretion as a complement of standard procedures. You remember July 17, 2014, the Malaysian airliner MH17 which was coming from Holland and entered the airspace of Ukraine where there was a war, and the flight came down killing everybody on board. It was alleged that the plane was shot down.
Thus, even if the air control tower gave you a flight path, it is incumbent on pilots to avoid the danger spots or sort this out before flying.
Aviation teams must endeavour to walk the fine line between suggested methods, and their own judgements when faced with tricky situations. Of course, discretion must be situated within generally acceptable principles.
When the individual’s action is influenced by malice, it comes to the heart-rending example of the German Wings that was deliberately sent tumbling in the French Alps by the pilot who allegedly locked out the co-pilot after he visited the washroom.
This occurred on March 24, 2015 to the Airbus that started its journey from Barcelona, Spain and was expecting to land in Dusseldorf, Germany. This point shoots down the claim that because pilots are trained they are likely to do the right thing all the time and not go eccentric.
Many air travellers have had scary moments once upon a time, and in Ghana, the August 6, 2025, helicopter crash nudged the nation accidents of such magnitude are real.
I got something more than butterflies in my tummy, I should say it felt like leaping frogs, when a commercial flight from New York violently vibrated across the Atlantic for good 30 minutes before things turned calm.
There was another turbulence just as we took off from Sao Paolo, Brazil, in which the cabin crew on the verge of serving meals, disappeared. I remember when the swings subsided, and in-flight services resumed, I declined the food, which elicited a dark humour from an air hostess.
On Ghana’s territory, my worst experience was in a political campaign period which role players were huddled on a flight that was to head to Tamale in the Northern region. Just after take off, the pilot announced that the weather was good except for the thick clouds in the Brong Ahafo region.
The unfriendly weather took a wicked toll beyond the wildest imaginations of the pilots when the aircraft entered thunderstorms. The pilots encountered a defiant weather as they sought to penetrate it to land in Tamale. It was a brush with death that day.
It was later announced that the flight would land in Kumasi instead. I remember in that frightful tangle, one passenger lost scruples, and headed to the plane’s door to exit. In the dire state of affairs, our plane forced a landing in Tamale where we noticed it was raining cats and dogs. Was this an act of foolhardiness?
Coming to Black Wednesday in Ghana’s history, to discuss the disaster which consumed high-ranking state officials including two key Ministers of State, I was humbled by the footage I watched because the destruction was akin to an apocalypse.
I have had a close interface with the Ghana Air Force to know their fastidiousness and general astuteness. They are very particular and careful. In one episode in 2011 whilst the Vice President, and others like Alhaji Asuma Banda and Abedi Pele were on board the Falcon, there was an emergency landing in the desert city of Cufra in Libya.
This became the transit of the flight between Cairo, Egypt and Bobo Dioulasso, Burkina Faso. We started our journey from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. In this one, the plummet of the aircraft was guided by the pilot.
Someone stopped taking his meal and began looking through the window to understand what was happening. In all these, the flight engineer pensively shuttled the cabin and the cockpit until the bullet plane landed.
There we were told it was a precaution as a detection was made that the fuel flow to one of the three engines of the plane ceased. Libya’s Leader, Col. Muammar Gaddafi sent another plane to convey the Ghanaian delegation to Burkina Faso.
In one South American city, a flight in which I was, delayed. Engineers were spotted frantically working on a part of the aircraft before take off. The air-conditioning were down, and that betrayed what aviators sometimes try to hide from travelers.
The flight’s managers later said they were going to replace the troubled plane but when some businessmen insisted the measure would further delay them, the airline reloaded the passengers on the same flight, and it took off. I called it “a flight gone berserk” for it was really horrible. What a risk they took?
Conventionally, the Ghana Armed Forces are known for their discipline. They are one of my three pillars of correctness and discipline in Ghana. The other two are our scientists and foreign service workers. These are professionals who make sure the right things are done all the time.
I have been on a location where the Commander of the Air Force who was to pilot the President of the Republic, stood in the open to watch the skies in a quick risk analysis to determine how safe their flight would be before it took off.
Where I had a choice, I took the personal decision to travel by road ahead of delegations coming with flights, if my instincts were uncomfortable.
In security matters, including travel safety, it must solely be the decision of the individual, regarding which of the alternatives to embrace or is suitable. Concerning state officials, I vouch a trade off in which delegation members made their choices instead of the one’s designed for their collective use by the state apparatus.
Unless, the flight was seized in the catastrophic moment that rapidly changed everything, the occupants should have been able to reveal premonitions with urgent phone calls on people outside the aircraft. As several eye-witnesses reported the low altitude of the flight, such calls would have been within radius of telephone connectivity.
I was on an Emirati flight from Dubai to Beijing when my cell phone belled. At the time, the flight was over 30,000 feet above sea level. And so it was quite bizarre how everything went silent inside the helicopter which was allegedly flying just above trees before the crash at Adansi Sikaman. Well, there is a black box to provide some vital leads.
Out of experiences from hindsight, we will point to mechanical fault, a pilot’s error, a suicide mission, and even the shooting down of the helicopter by armed illegal small-scale miners whom the state are tracking down.
The last factor seems unlikely to me, though still open-ended. We are in a country where contemporary crimes have exceeded the conventional thresholds. The unthinkable has happened in the land and it is right for people to figure all possibilities.
The courts are hearing cases on sophisticated weapons having been stolen from armouries. Heists have taken place on bullion vans. People audaciously kill with sharp instruments such as knives. Human parts have been recovered from refrigerators in a person’s room. A mob injustice flogged a suspected thief and cut off his testicles with a sharp blade.
In one murder case, the jury was told the victim was buried alive. So, you see, the question about the helicopter having been shot by a sniper is still one of the cards on the table, because really, the helicopter had made almost all the journey and was within short distance of landing in Obuasi.
About suspicions of sabotage, that guesswork oscillates between mistrusts and mutual suspicions on one hand, to real possibilities that continue to emerge in the body politic on another hand. I do not think the politician who said he wanted the government to “fail” had this “tragic crash” in mind when he said so.
It is also possible the August 6 doomed flight from Accra to Obuasi could have developed a sudden fault. We must not forget that some of the worst air disasters was triggered by birds. Birds getting stuck in the engines of planes or interfering in rotating blades.
The non-accidental causes would certainly include the recent example of Ahmedabad in which investigators allegedly found fuel supply knobs on the Indian airliner turned off. Whether accidental or not, lack of double checks fail aircrafts.
This is not the first time a Ghana Air Force plane, or for that matter, Ghana has incurred an accident in the air on her own soil, but admittedly, the latest one blots the fine aviation record under the belt of Ghana because the minuses have been few and far between, as to make us oblivious of the dangers ahead.
