The singer Banky-W was one of the passengers on Arik-Air plane in Lagos; Banky who was in Lagos on March 31st to a flight to New York witness the ignominious failure that occur while the whole passengers where on their seats; and shares his thought base-on the defect of Arik-Air Aircraft. His words:
Recently, footage from a camera phone has surfaced online about the dire circumstances that passengers suffered prior to take-off, on board an Arik Air flight from Lagos to New York; I was one of the passengers. For anyone who has not seen the footage, it’s available on Youtube and various News Websites and Blogs. However, for purposes of this write-up, I will recount what happened.
The flight was scheduled to take off at about 1150pm on March 31st, 2014. Boarding was completed on time, and all the passengers settled in their seats and prepared for the flight to begin. However, there seemed to be a delay in operations because although the ground crew had exited the aircraft and the cabin doors were shut, we weren’t moving. The pilot announced that there was a small delay in the ground crew operations on the plane, and that we should be patient as the flight would depart “in a few minutes”.
The problem was, the air conditioning was not turned on. Midnight soon passed, and there was still no A/C, neither did it feel like we were going anywhere, anytime soon. Passengers were vigorously fanning themselves, asking for water and ice from the Crew, and doing whatever they could to stay cool and hydrated. The reality was that the heat in the plane was quite frankly unbearable. It’s hot enough in Nigeria these days, and then you couple that with a cabin whose doors have been shut, and a bunch of people locked inside that enclosed space… suffice it to say it escalated from bad to worse very quickly. The Captain made another announcement about how he’s “sorry for the delay, but it was due to the ground operations”, and that there was only one engine on and that was why the A/C could not be turned on yet. By now it was well past 12:30 and people were becoming extremely frustrated. Parents had begun taking the clothes off their children, children were crying, one lady looked like she would faint. Still, there was no further update on when we would take off and when the A/C would come on.

