One of the more enduring lessons that history teaches is, when commercial considerations rule in any social setting, catastrophes loom, large as life. This notion was strikingly brought home to me recently, aboard a Benin/Abuja flight.

As the Air Peace 737 jet gathered speed on the Benin Airport’s relatively short runway, l helplessly looked through a window, with half bated breath, praying for a lift off before we run out of runway. With a couple of hundred yards to spare the front wheels heaved off the tarmac; by the time the rear wheels lifted we were practically out of runway(!) Any passenger who had consciously followed the takeoff procedure couldn’t have helped feeling somewhat eerie at the abrupt termination of the runway. l certainly did, and perhaps for the umpteenth time.

And, for the umpteenth time, my mind voluntarily recalled that catastrophic crash of Air France’s supersonic jet in Paris many years since. Moments before the thundering aircraft’s front wheels lifted, one of its four engines burst out in flames. Onlookers must have logically expected the pilot to abort the takeoff, but alas, the supersonic jet took to the air even with the rapidly spreading flames. Seconds later the world witnessed the first aircrash of a commercial supersonic aircraft. It was also to be the last as commercial supersonic aircraft were withdrawn from service as a consequence.

Reports by various Aviation accidents commissions observed that the flames were caused by a metallic object which was split-seconds earlier picked up by one of the rear wheels. Curiously, none of the commissions cared to tell the world why the pilot didn’t abort an obviously ill-fated flight. Rather the commissions unanimously recommended that commercial supersonic flights be banned(??).

However, industry-wide opinion put the cause of the crash on inadequate infrastructure: the standard runways for non-supersonic aircraft proved fatally inadequate for commercial supersonic aircraft in an emergency. Had the extant runways envisaged commercial supersonic aircraft, those runways would have had additional redundancies, which would have enabled the Air France’s pilot to abort the takeoff, thus sparing over one hundred lives.

One is then tempted to ask the logical question, why were extant runways not expanded before launching supersonic commercial flights? It is impossible to satisfactorily answer this question without interjecting costs/benefits analysis into the discussion; that is, commercial considerations juxtaposed with technical recommendations. In a world of conflicting interests, it is inevitable that commercial considerations would always compete with technical recommendations, but for some reasons, the former have always tended to win the day. Sometimes at the cost of extreme loss of human lives.

The sinking of the ‘Unsinkable Titanic’ remains a classic example of when commercial considerations trumped technical advice at the expense of great loss of human lives. Commercial arrangements had scheduled the luxury ship’s trip, but technical challenges clashed with that schedule. With technical crew still battling fires in the engine room below, the company’s executives issued an “all’s clear” order to the captain to set sail(!). In the interval wealthy passengers popped champagne bottles in their respective cabins, utterly unaware their collective fate had been sealed. Mere days later the world’s largest ship ever, hit the seabed taking the lives of about one thousand people.

Another graphic example is the rising, if alarming incidents of petrol haulage vehicles explosions across Nigeria. Verifiable reports by the Federal Roads Safety Corps (FRSC) have consistently stated that poor maintenance is more often than not the cause of those fatal incidents: poorly maintained laden articulated vehicles plying poorly maintained roads. A case of a double edged sword, or burning one’s own candle at both ends. Of course everyone knows the common phrase, “Nigeria has no maintenance culture!” and everyone agrees, l inclusive, but more importantly, it’s essential we understand that the reason for that omission is simply because Nigerians seemingly don’t understand maintenance culture.

Maintenance is not to be mistaken for repairing a damage. Maintenance seeks to avert damage altogether; it does so by maintaining the redundancies that have been put in place to avert damage or mechanical failure. (Could costs-versus-benefits considerations be the reason for this unnerving national ignorance?)

The wisest of persons always heed Sod’s Law: If something is likely to go wrong, it will. So every time an aircraft speeds down the runway something could go wrong before it takes off, typical of which are birds strikes on engines.

When that dreaded scenario occurs on a runway with inadequate redundancy, the stricken aircraft would be forced to takeoff with the hope of doing a quick turnaround and come in for landing. But, as the world witnessed about a decade since with the “Hudson River landing in New York, the chances of executing a quick turnaround are virtually zero.

It is as likely the Benin Airport is representative of the situations at our other Local airports; if so, the relevant authorities should seriously rethink the state of the runways at those airports. Surely, commercial considerations cannot be allowed to take precedence over technical advisory in this situation – a stitch in time saves nine.

Nkemdiche is a consulting engineer.