By Alexander Nwuba
I have loved airplanes since I was a child. It is that love, long before any title or office, that brought me into aviation, and it is what still brings me to the airport. So, I have never been able to run an airline from behind a desk.
As CEO, I spent more time at the airport than in the office: standing in the terminal, watching passengers, watching their experience, their anxieties, their small frustrations, and sometimes stepping in personally.
One occasion has stayed with me for years. A crew, in a hurry to resolve a snag, informed passengers of a technical problem and then opened the engine cowling in full view of the cabin. For more than thirty minutes the passengers sat watching engineers work inside an open engine. When the work was done, and the aircraft declared serviceable, the passengers refused to go. I do not blame them. Nobody had translated what they had seen. So I went on board myself. I told them the truth: that the men and women in the flight deck have families waiting at home, and that no crew on earth knowingly undertakes a dangerous mission.
The crew had done the work in full view simply to save time, sparing everyone the disruption of disembarking and reboarding, never imagining how it would look from a cabin window. The engineering was sound; the communication was not. I offered to take the flight with them. We resolved it together, and the flight proceeded without incident.
I have often stood at the ramp watching crews prepare for departure under heavy rain, and marveled at the technology, the safety margins and the redundancy of modern aviation, every one of them the product of a long history of understanding problems and resolving them.
Yesterday’s incident reminded me of all of this. On Thursday, an Enugu Air jet suffered a runway excursion on landing at Benin Airport. A modern, capable aircraft; an experienced crew. Every passenger and every crew member walked away unhurt, and the Nigeria Safety Investigation Bureau has opened an investigation, as it should.
Let me be clear from the outset: responsible aviation does not permit us to speak to an incident that is under investigation, and this piece does not examine the circumstances of that event. What happened, and why, belongs to the investigators, and we will all be better for letting them do their work.
What I want to address is something different: how we talk to the public when such events occur. And here is where my industry, which I love, lets itself down. We reported it as a “runway excursion,” a precise technical term, and expected the travelling public to understand and leave it at that. Meanwhile, the media called it a “crash landing,” and we left it like that too. Between the jargon we offer and the drama the headlines supply, there is a gap.
Aviation needs to offer explanations that are technical enough to be true, careful enough to avoid prejudging liability, and plain enough to make sense. “Technical issues” and “operational reasons” leave gaps, and the public fills gaps with fear.
So let me fill this one plainly. A runway excursion means an aircraft left the paved surface of the runway, either running past the end of it or veering off the side, almost always at low speed, at the very end of a flight that was otherwise normal. It is not a crash. And crucially, it is an event the entire system anticipates.
Runways are surrounded by graded strips and safety areas for precisely this reason. Aircraft cabins are certified so that a full load of passengers can evacuate in ninety seconds using only half the exits. Seats are built to withstand forces many times stronger than any excursion produces. The aircraft and its cabin are designed for sure accidents, because even at home, we spill coffee and we break plates. Design assumes the spill; that is why the plates that matter don’t break.
Transparency demands that I also say this: yesterday was not the first such event in Nigeria, and it will probably not be the last. Our own recent history, particularly in the Niger Delta, where Port Harcourt sits under some of the heaviest rainfall in the country, tells the story honestly.
In February 2018, a Dana Air MD-83 landing at Port Harcourt in a rainstorm overran the end of the runway and came to rest some three hundred metres beyond it; everyone on board evacuated safely. In June 2019, an Air Peace Boeing 737 landing at the same airport in heavy rain, on a runway sheeted with water, veered off the surface; everyone walked away. In July 2025, another Air Peace flight left the runway at Port Harcourt on landing; again, no injuries, and the airline immediately launched a safety review. And yesterday at Benin: every passenger safe, every crew member safe.
I say nothing about yesterday’s event, whose facts await the NSIB. But look at the concluded cases honestly and two truths emerge. The first is that such events cluster around known, understood causes: torrential rain, water on the runway, the fine judgement of touchdown point and braking on a wet surface. Every complete investigation has fed back into the system: better drainage, better friction testing, firmer go-around discipline, better training. That is how aviation has always worked.
The second truth is the one that matters most to the travelling public: in every single one of these events, the passengers walked away. No deaths. No injuries. The aeroplane took the damage, so the people didn’t. That is not luck repeated four times; that is design doing its job.
I hear that some people, shaken by the headlines, are talking about travelling by road instead. I say this with respect and with the numbers on my side: aviation remains, by an enormous margin, the safest form of travel ever devised. Measured per kilometer travelled, the most dangerous part of most journeys by air is the drive to the airport. A once-in-a-decade event in which everyone walks away is not a reason to choose a mode of transport that quietly claims lives on our roads every single day.
Once in a decade, such accidents will happen. Rain will keep falling on Port Harcourt and Benin. What we owe the public is not a promise that nothing will ever go wrong, for no honest industry can promise that, but three things: aircraft and airfields designed so that when something goes wrong, everyone walks away; investigations that find causes and fix them; and explanations in language that respects people’s intelligence instead of hiding behind terminology.
I meant it then. I mean it now. I would board that Enugu Air flight tomorrow morning without a second thought, and so would every pilot, every engineer and every cabin crew member I have ever worked with. Because they, too, have families waiting at home.
Alexander Nwuba is the President, Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association of Nigeria (AOPAN); 2nd Vice President, Aviation Safety Roundtable Initiative (ART) and a committed air traveler.
