EU's ban on African 'flying coffins' raises safety concerns and questions

According to Associated Press (AP), in Nigeria late last year, two planes flying domestic routes crashed within seven weeks of each other killing 224 people, including dozens of schoolchildren heading home for Christmas holidays. The causes of those crashes have not been determined, but Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo has referred to an intelligence report detailing safety problems involving Nigerian airlines, including planes experiencing landing gear trouble.

In December, Obasanjo also blamed corruption for some of the troubles in his country's aviation industry and called in international experts for a safety review. Most other nations, though, are yet to move their feet.

In the wake of economic liberalization, many governments are trying to adapt and give in to privatization, to meet the demands of faster-than average passenger growth, but fail to strengthen regulatory mechanisms.

"You've got the general problem of poverty and lack of government capacity. We've gone far in one way, but not the other," AP quoted Princeton Lyman, a former U.S. ambassador to Nigeria, currently a Council on Foreign Affairs fellow, as saying.

One of the biggest problems faced by the airlines of most nations is their inability to buy new aircrafts and hence, their greater dependence on secondhand ones purchased from East European and former Soviet-bloc nations. These planes hardly pass the safety test and, over time, spare parts can be hard to obtain and some of the aging planes' maintenance documentation get lost.

Other airlines, particularly in vast Congo, who dislike shopping overseas, opt for refurbishing rickety old jets or propeller-driven planes, including some old military aircraft which are converted to passenger aircraft with cheap plastic chairs fixed in.