The security at the Nigerian airports was again yesterday but to questions as a decomposing body of a 30-year-old man was found in the wheel-well of Arik Air flight, A330-200 at the Oliver Tambo International Airport, Johannesburg, South Africa.
According to statement from the airline, the aircraft operated the scheduled Lagos-Johannesburg flight that departed the Murtala Muhammed International Airport at 3:55p.m. on November 29, 2016 and arrived Johannesburg shortly before 11p.m.
Arik said it was engineers of South African Airways Technical facility at the airport where the aircraft was scheduled for a routine maintenance check that discovered the body of the stowaway during inspection.
The body had decomposed to a third degree before it was discovered and inside source disclosed that the deceased might have hidden himself in the aircraft on Sunday when the aircraft departed from the Murtala Muhammed International Airport, Lagos to JFK Airport in New York and died of cold when the aircraft gained altitude to a freezing level.
This indicated that the body might have been there for days before it was discovered. The body was discovered by engineers when the the aircraft taxied to a maintenance facility for A Check, expected to last for 48 hours.
This is the third dead stowaway would be found in Arik aircraft, an indictment on the nation’s airports to laxity in the security apparatus. The Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN) and the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) need to sensitize the public that nobody survives in aircraft wheel-well and investigate how these people got on the aircraft. This couldn’t have happened without act collaboration of Arik and the airport security staff.
