By Rekpene Bassey
On Monday, October 5, 2026, I wrote on the back page of ThisNigeria about the urgent need to strengthen security around aviation, following the extraordinary incident involving a flydubai flight in which a co-pilot allegedly attacked the captain in an apparent attempt to seize control of the aircraft and cause a catastrophe.
The argument was simple but fundamental: modern aviation security can no longer be confined to airport gates, passenger screening and cockpit doors; the human being entrusted with the aircraft is himself part of the security architecture.
Within hours of that article appearing, Nigeria was confronted with another aviation tragedy. A Nigerian Air Force ATR-42, designated NAF 931, crashed in the Igbokoda area of Ondo State while flying from Benin to Lagos on a routine mission. All 25 persons on board—five crew members and 20 passengers—were subsequently confirmed dead.
The coincidence of the two events is unsettling, but it would be intellectually irresponsible to suggest that they were connected or that the cause of the NAF crash is already known. It is not. The Chief of the Air Staff, Air Marshal Kelvin Aneke, has ordered a comprehensive investigation, and the NAF has rightly cautioned against speculation and the circulation of unverified information. Until the evidence is examined, the cause must remain a question, not a conclusion.
However, tragedy has a way of forcing questions that routine bureaucratic processes sometimes postpone. The most important question arising from NAF 931 is therefore not simply, “What caused the crash?” It is also this: How confident should Nigerians be that every aircraft operating within our national aviation ecosystem is demonstrably airworthy, operationally safe and adequately protected against deliberate human interference?
Airworthiness and security are not the same thing. An aircraft can be mechanically sound and still be vulnerable to sabotage; an aircraft can have sophisticated security controls and still be unsafe because of maintenance deficiencies.
Aviation safety is therefore a chain, and the chain is only as strong as its weakest link—aircraft engineering, maintenance, crew competence, human factors, air traffic management, weather information, emergency response, airport infrastructure and regulatory oversight.
The flydubai episode exposed one of the aviation industry’s most uncomfortable vulnerabilities: the threat can come from inside the cockpit. According to current reporting, the co-pilot allegedly attacked the captain with a crash axe and attempted to take control of the aircraft before being subdued and the aircraft diverted safely. The incident has understandably renewed international scrutiny of cockpit security, pilot screening and the management of human threats inside the aviation system.
That lesson should not be reduced to airport security. Aviation security must begin long before a passenger reaches an aircraft. It encompasses recruitment, background checks, licensing, recurrent training, psychological and behavioural assessment, access control, insider-threat monitoring, cockpit procedures and the ability of an airline or military aviation organisation to detect abnormal behaviour before it becomes an operational emergency.
But NAF 931 introduces a different and equally important dimension: mechanical and operational reliability. We should resist the temptation to equate an aircraft’s age with its safety. Age by itself does not determine airworthiness; continuing airworthiness depends upon maintenance, inspections, component life limits, repairs, modifications and compliance with prescribed technical requirements. The NCAA itself makes this distinction explicitly.
The real issue, therefore, is not whether Nigeria operates old or new aircraft. It is whether every aircraft is subjected to a maintenance regime capable of establishing, documenting and independently verifying that it is fit to fly before every mission.
An older aircraft maintained to rigorous standards may be safer than a newer aircraft subjected to poor maintenance, weak supervision or deferred defects.
Nigeria cannot, however, afford a culture in which compliance exists principally on paper. The Nigeria Civil Aviation Authority has a formal Directorate of Airworthiness Standards responsible for certification, continuing airworthiness, maintenance organisations, repairs, modifications and surveillance. Its safety-management framework also requires aviation organisations to identify and manage operational risks systematically.
There are reasons for cautious confidence. In April 2026, Nigeria reported a 91.45 per cent Effective Implementation score following an ICAO Coordinated Validation Mission examining the country’s aviation safety oversight capabilities.
The exercise was specifically designed to identify strengths and weaknesses in the national system. That is significant progress, but it should not be mistaken for a certificate of perfection. Aviation safety is not a trophy awarded once; it is a discipline that must be continuously earned.
The same principle applies to aviation security. In January 2026, the NCAA and the United Kingdom’s Department for Transport conducted a joint aviation-security vulnerability assessment examining passenger and baggage screening, access control, perimeter security and inter-agency coordination. In July, the NCAA held a strategic security meeting to review its implementation of corrective actions under ICAO’s Universal Security Audit Programme Continuous Monitoring Approach.
These initiatives matter because aviation security is fundamentally an exercise in anticipating the adversary. Terrorists, saboteurs, criminals and malicious insiders do not attack systems where they are strongest; they search for the seam between institutions, the neglected access point, the unguarded perimeter, the compromised employee, the poorly examined passenger or the assumption that yesterday’s security arrangement will defeat tomorrow’s threat.
Nigeria therefore needs an integrated National Aviation Safety and Security Architecture linking the NCAA, Nigerian Air Force, Nigerian Safety Investigation Bureau, Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria, air navigation authorities, airport operators, airlines, intelligence agencies and other relevant security institutions. The objective should not be another committee. It should be a permanent intelligence-led mechanism for identifying vulnerabilities, sharing threat information and closing security gaps before they become disasters.
The military dimension deserves particular attention. Military aircraft operate under missions and circumstances that differ from commercial aviation, and their safety governance cannot simply be transplanted from the civilian system.
But that distinction should never become a justification for opacity. The public may not need operationally sensitive information, but it is entitled to confidence that aircraft assigned to carry military personnel and civilians are maintained, inspected, crewed and operated under rigorous safety standards.
The NAF investigation into NAF 931 must consequently go beyond identifying the immediate technical cause of the crash. It should examine the entire chain of events: the aircraft’s maintenance history, component and engine records, recent inspections, crew qualifications and duty cycles, weather conditions, communications, navigation, flight data, air-traffic-control records, operational planning and emergency-response timelines.
Where evidence permits, investigators should also establish whether any organisational or systemic factor contributed to the tragedy.
There is another lesson from the changing nature of aviation risk. The traditional aviation-security model largely asks: Who is trying to get into the aircraft? The modern model must also ask: Who has legitimate access to the aircraft, what can they do with that access, and what safeguards exist if they suddenly become a threat? That is the deeper significance of the flydubai incident and of previous tragedies involving deliberate pilot actions.
Technology can help, but technology is not a substitute for institutional discipline. Flight-data monitoring, predictive maintenance, biometric access, secure cockpit systems, digital maintenance records, artificial-intelligence-
But technology becomes another vulnerability when systems are poorly maintained, poorly integrated or inadequately protected against cyber intrusion.
Cybersecurity now belongs squarely within aviation security. Modern aircraft are computers with wings, connected to increasingly complex networks on the ground and in the air. Navigation, communications, passenger processing, maintenance systems and operational databases all generate digital vulnerabilities.
A serious national aviation-security strategy must therefore treat cyber threats, insider threats and physical threats as parts of one security environment rather than as separate bureaucratic compartments.
Equally important is the human factor. Pilots, engineers, air-traffic controllers, cabin crew, security officers and maintenance personnel operate under enormous responsibility. Fatigue, stress, inadequate training, poor communication, organisational pressure and fear of reporting mistakes can all undermine safety.
A mature aviation system does not merely punish failure after an accident; it creates mechanisms through which personnel can report hazards before those hazards become accidents.
The Igbokoda tragedy also reminds us that emergency response is part of aviation safety. The NAF said search-and-rescue procedures were activated immediately in coordination with relevant authorities. That response must now be studied as rigorously as the crash itself.
In aviation, minutes matter. The location of wreckage, access to difficult terrain, communications, medical evacuation, survivor location and coordination among agencies can determine whether an emergency becomes a survivable accident or a mass-casualty event.
There is also a communications lesson. The initial discrepancy over the number of people aboard NAF 931—with an earlier figure of 32 subsequently corrected by the NAF to 25—illustrates why crisis communication must be anchored in verified manifests and a single authoritative information chain. In a disaster, inaccurate information compounds grief, frustrates rescue operations and creates fertile ground for conspiracy theories.
The names of the 25 victims have now been released: five crew members and 20 passengers, including officers, soldiers, technicians and civilians. Behind every name is a family, a community and a future interrupted.
The proper response is therefore not sensationalism but accountability—accountability to the dead, to their families, to the Nigerian Air Force and to every Nigerian who boards an aircraft believing that the institutions responsible for aviation have done everything reasonably possible to keep them safe.
The question, then, is not whether Nigerian aviation is safe or unsafe in some sweeping, political sense. That is too crude a formulation. The serious question is whether our safety assurance mechanisms are sufficiently rigorous, transparent, independent, intelligence-led and continuously tested to identify failure before failure identifies us.
Nigeria’s recent regulatory progress, including the reported ICAO validation score, provides grounds for confidence; NAF 931 provides grounds for renewed vigilance. Both facts can be true at the same time.
The greatest mistake would be to allow the national mourning over NAF 931 to disappear with the lowering of flags. Every aviation tragedy should produce institutional memory: better maintenance, stronger inspections, deeper intelligence, more rigorous crew screening, stronger cockpit protection, improved emergency response, better inter-agency coordination and an uncompromising culture in which no aircraft flies merely because it is expected to fly.
Airworthiness must never be presumed; it must be demonstrated. Security must never be assumed; it must be continuously tested. And aviation safety must never be treated as an administrative routine, because at 30,000 feet above sea level, the smallest institutional weakness can become a national tragedy.
*Rekpene Bassey is a Security Specialist and President of the African Council on Narcotics (ACON)
