PORT HARCOURT (AP):
INVESTIGATORS YESTERDAY picked through the scorched wreckage of an airliner that was ferrying school children home for the holidays when it crashed, killing 107 people on board in Nigeria's latest air disaster. Over 60 students were among the dead.
The cause of the crash was still unknown a day after the Sosoliso Airlines' McDonnell Douglas DC-9 slammed into the ground on approach to the southern oil-industry centre of Port Harcourt.
The plane was carrying 110 people, including 71 teenagers.
SECOND MAJOR AIR ACCIDENT
It was the second major air accident in seven weeks in Africa's most-populous nation, and President Olusegun Obasanjo promised yesterday to overhaul Nigeria's civil-aviation structures.
Airport officials directed frantic family members to local morgues. At one overwhelmed hospital, bodies were heaped together due to lack of capacity.
One survivor lay swaddled in bandages at a hospital's intensive care unit, with only her toes, face and neck visible - all severely burned in the fiery accident.
The twisted, charred wreckage lay yesterday in two principal parts, several hundred metres apart, with investigators picking through the pieces in search for clues as to why the plane crashed.
Aviation Ministry official Tommy Oyelade said the plane's flight-data recorders, or so-called black boxes, had been recovered and would be examined.
The weather had been stormy around the airport at the time of the crash, National Civil Aviation Authority spokesman Sam Adurogboye said. Witnesses said they saw lightning as the plane approached the runway.
Adurogboye said there had been seven crew members on board, but did not say if any were among the survivors.
Obasanjo cancelled a visit to Portugal, scheduled to have begun yesterday, and said he would meet urgently with the country's airline operators over "much-needed reforms in Nigeria's aviation industry," presidential spokeswoman Remi Oyo said.
