NAF PLANE NGR 931 VANISHED FROM RADAR AT 9.13 AM AND CRASHED IN AN ONDO SWAMP WITH 32 ON BOARD

A Nigerian Air Force aircraft disappeared from radar minutes after leaving Benin City on Monday and crashed into a swamp at Igbokoda in Ondo State. Thirty two people were on board. The presidency said none of them survived.

The aircraft was an ATR 42, tail number NGR 931. It was on a routine mission from Benin, the Edo State capital, to Lagos. Aviation and Aerospace Development Minister Festus Keyamo said air traffic controllers told him the aircraft dropped off radar at 0913 hours. “All efforts to raise the aircraft on radio proved abortive,” he said. The wreckage was then confirmed close to the naval base in Igbokoda, headquarters of Ilaje local government. Search and rescue started at once.

Keyamo said preliminary information put 25 passengers and seven crew on the aircraft. He noted that military flights sit outside the Ministry of Aviation and the Civil Aviation Authority. He said he had spoken to the Chief of Air Staff, Air Marshal Sunday Kelvin Aneke, and offered the ministry’s help. The Air Force, through Air Commodore Ehimen Ejodame, confirmed the aircraft was its own, that the mission was routine, and that search and rescue was running with other agencies. It did not, in that first statement, give a death toll. The presidency later said all 32 were killed. The Air Force said names would be released after families were told. President Bola Tinubu ordered a probe and declared three days of national mourning, with flags at half staff.

A senior air traffic controller who asked not to be named, because he was not cleared to speak, said the flight had checked in shortly after takeoff and then vanished. “When the aircraft took off, we were in touch with it shortly afterward, but it disappeared from the radar. Efforts to reach it were unsuccessful,” he said. He called the sequence shoddy and strange. “Almost immediately after it took off, we lost communication with it. There was no communication, nothing. And that makes it suspicious. The aircraft just vanished until the crash.” Staff at reporting points near Okitipupa later heard a loud bang they took for the impact. He said search and rescue was still open when he spoke.

On the ground, a resident who gave his name as Sola said it was drizzling. People heard a very loud sound and could not reach the site. The creek is swamp. They watched from a distance. Police, military teams and fishermen began the recovery. By night the wreckage was still stuck in the creek. Nobody had been brought out in the accounts from the bank. Teams were also looking for the flight recorders.

The gap between those accounts is the story of the first day. Controllers lost the aircraft at 9.13 a.m. Keyamo confirmed the radar loss, the failed radio calls, the wreckage and the headcount. The Air Force confirmed the type, the route and the rescue. The presidency said the 32 were dead. Residents said the swamp had not yet given up the bodies. A controller used the word suspicious for a contact that died almost as soon as it began. That word is his. It is not a finding of sabotage, a mechanical cause, or a weather cause. The rain was there. The cause is not.

Military aircraft do not file a public civil investigation in the same channel as an airline. Keyamo was explicit that his ministry does not control them. The probe Tinubu ordered will have to say who leads it, whether the recorders can be lifted from the creek, and why a crew that had just checked in went silent. Until that file exists, NGR 931 is a tail number, a time, a swamp beside a naval base, and 32 names the Air Force has not yet read out.