Helicopter crash: 5 Ghanaians were onboard
Efforts are still underway to find the missing person in Thursday’s helicopter crash 20 nautical miles off the coast of Takoradi, the Western Regional capital.
Vessels from the Ghana Navy, Tullow Oil and Lukoil as well as some fishing communities have joined in efforts to locate the missing person.
The helicopter which was carrying eight people crashed into the sea Thursday afternoon, killing three of them. Four were rescued and are reported to be in a stable condition at a hospital in Takoradi.
According to the Director of Air Travel Services at the Ghana Civil Aviation Authority, Mr Albert Taylor, there were no indications of where the missing person was as of Friday morning and that the search and rescue mission was still underway.
He said out of the eight people on board, six were professionals and two were crew pilots.
On board the helicopter were a Nigerian, a British and a Frenchman. The remaining five were Ghanaians.
Investigations
Mr Taylor told Radio Gold on Friday morning that the cause of the crash could not be ascertained yet.
“Normally when such an accident happens, we have phases and the first phase is search and rescue.”
“As of now the search and rescue has recovered three dead bodies, four survivors and one is missing.”
All efforts now are geared towards finding the missing person, he said.
“This is the priority and this is where the attention is, we haven’t come to how and what happened.”
He explained that it rained in Takoradi around 2pm on Thursday.
The Ghana Air Force Control Tower at Takoradi Airport was notified that the aircraft was supposed to have landed on the rig at 1:10pm but as of 2pm it had not landed and had not contacted them either.
He said the aircraft was an Ivorian registered aircraft and that among the dead are foreign nationals.
International civil aviation requires an independent body to investigate such accidents and in Ghana that assignment is done by the Minister of Transport who has to establish or institute an independent accident investigation committee.
History of plane crashes
Ghana has recorded very few air crashes.
On May 8, 1997, a Ghana Air Force jet which had escorted then President Jerry John Rawlings’s aircraft on his return from Botswana crashed into a nearby bush off the main runway at the Kotoka International Airport (KIA), killing the pilot.
On June 5, 2000, a Fokker 27 aircraft on a normal domestic flight from Tamale to Accra with 52 passengers and crew on board crashed at the threshold of the KIA on landing, killing six of the passengers instantly.
About 7.10 p.m. on Saturday, June 2, 2012, a Boeing 727-200 cargo plane which had taken off from Lagos, Nigeria, and carrying general goods to Cote d’Ivoire via Accra rammed into a Benz bus, with registration GE 5471 Z, on the 37 Military Hospital-Burma Camp road.
The aircraft overshot the runway on landing and went through the airport perimeter fence before crashing into the bus, instantly killing all 10 passengers on board, including the driver.