Dana Crash: 0ver 70 Yet To Be Compensated, As Airline Resumes Flight

Dana Airlines  resumed flight operations Friday, about seven months after one of its aircraft crashed into a building in Lagos, killing 163 people on board the country’s worst airline disaster in about two decades with an inaugural flight to Abuja. this is even as some victims’ families who are yet to be compensated described  the re-issuance of Dana operational license by the federal government as malicious and wicked.

The government lifted a ban on the airline in September but an investigation is ongoing and there is still no official explanation of the crash.

The airline’s five remaining McDonnell Douglas MD-83’s operating in Nigeria have a capacity of 140.
The aircraft M083 with number 7VC9QZ and piloted by Captain  Ola Olukayode departed from domestic wing of the Murtala Mohammed International Airport, Lagos at exactly 10.10am and landed smoothly at the Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport, Abuja at exactly 11.08 am.

Airline spokesman Tony Usidamen said 67 passengers were on board the resumed Lagos-Abuja flight yesterday and 82 on the return journey.

…Victims’ families kick
Meanwhile, yet to be compensated families of the ill-fated Dana Airplane that crashed on the 3rd of June 2012 in Lagos killing all 153 people on board as well as some ground victims have described the re-issuance of Dana operational license by the federal government as malicious and wicked.

The families also lamented that the management of Dana has deliberately and maliciously refused its insurers to pay the statutory compensation to them.

Out of the 153 victims on board as well as the unconfirmed number on ground, the insurers of Dana air fleet have only paid the statutory $30,000 compensation to about 80 families of the victims.

The deliberate refusal, according to the families, is as a result of the wicked machinations of Dana Airline and its representatives. It will be recalled that Section 48(3) of the Civil Aviation Act provides “In any case of aircraft accident resulting in death or injury of passengers, the carrier shall make advance payments of at least US $30,000(Thirty thousand United States dollars) within 30 days from the date of such accident, to the natural person or such natural persons who are entitled to claim compensation in order to meet the immediate economic needs of such persons and such advance payments shall not constitute recognition of liability and may be offset against any amounts subsequently paid as damages by the carrier.”

Legal practitioners and consultants, representing 40 families of the victims, M.O Awoniyi & Co, said that all efforts to get the claims to be paid thus far have proved abortive.

Awoyemi said, “We have tried severally and in vain, via written and oral communication(s) to get the Airline and its insurer’s solicitors, particularly the law firm of Yomi Oshikoya & Co. (who are responsible for giving the cheques to the families of the victims) to pay our clients their monies as stipulated in the Act, but all our efforts have not produced the desired result. They have only through, deceitful and deliberate measures prevented our clients from meeting their immediate and economic needs occasioned by the death of their loved ones in the plane crash. The name of two of our clients Ahmad Dukawa and Femi Shobowale were fraudulently listed by Dana Airlines, its local and international insurers, Prestige Assurance Plc and Pritchard Insurance/Lloyd’s of London as having been paid $30,000 each.

“It beats our imagination as to why five months after the plane crash which killed the families of our clients, thus rendering some of them widows, widowers, fatherless, and motherless, they (families of the victims) would still be subjected to such a painful, saddening and wicked manipulations by the Airline and its representatives, knowing fully well that they are still in grief and much sorrow, not only because they have lost their loved ones, but because they were killed in such circumstances. This is in direct disregard to the provision of the Civil Aviation Act which clearly states that compensation ought to have been paid within 30 days of the plane crash regardless of any prevailing circumstances.”

Culled from VANGUARD