The strange case of the air crash caused by a crocodile

The Filair Let L-410 Turbolet (9Q-CCN) departed N'Dolo Airport in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo on August 25, 2010. It was a short-range, twin-engine aircraft that had 19 passenger seats. The aircraft was unpressurized and could land at short and unpaved runways and in extreme conditions. It was due to fly via the towns of Kiri, Bokoro, Semendua, and finally to Bandundu Airport. There were 18 passengers on board at the time of the accident. The captain was Daniel Philemotte, a Belgian citizen who owned the company Filair. They had a small fleet of similar-sized aircraft, although two had been written off on bad landings, there had been no fatalities. The first officer was Chris Wilson from the UK. He was a former flight attendant with a British airline and was pursuing his dream of becoming a pilot. He had finished his training and had 1,000 flight hours behind him. A local female was working onboard as a flight attendant. Chris had complained about the captain's incompetence, and he did not want to fly with him anymore. He said that the captain's eyesight was so bad that he could barely read the instruments. He said that there was always some incident or another. The captain was at the controls at the time of the accident. The first officer had also expressed concerns about passengers walking around in the cabin and carrying animals on board. At the time, the Democratic Republic of Congo was still a developing nation. The aviation sector was not well-established, and although there were airlines operating, they had poor safety records and did not meet the standards of reporting or record keeping of other countries. It was just a short twenty-minute flight and the last sector that day. The flight operated as normal, and nothing unusual occurred. The Filair Let L-410 crashed into a mud brick house in a populated area on approach, 0.6 miles short of the runway at Bandundu Airport at 13:00 local time. It was said that the aircraft 'dropped like a leaf from the sky'. Sixteen people died, including the three crew members; there were two survivors, one of whom later died in the hospital. No one was injured on the ground. There was no post-impact fire. The sole survivor made a statement that a crocodile had escaped from another passenger's duffel bag. It is thought that the passenger was planning to sell the two to three-foot-long crocodile for profit in the city. The flight attendant saw it and ran to the cockpit to tell the flight crew, but the panicked passengers followed her to get away from the creature. This happened on the final approach, leading to a sudden center of gravity shift, leading to loss of control and either a nose-dive or a stall. The aircraft was destroyed. The crocodile survived, and local video footage emerged of the crocodile being taken out of the aircraft. However, it was killed at the scene with a machete by local authorities. It was not unusual for live animals such as chickens and dogs to be carried in the cabin, so it is conceivable that a passenger thought that it was okay to take the crocodile on board and that it would be considered valuable. The Congolese Ministry of Transport investigated the accident. It was initially suspected that the cause of the accident was fuel exhaustion, although later it was found that the fuel tanks still had 40 US gallons of fuel. The results of the investigation were not published in other countries. The UK AAIB said it was an unlikely conclusion, but it couldn't be ruled out. They had no data from the flight recorder, so they could not conclude the investigation. The inquest into the death of the first officer was an open verdict, as there was no data from the black box, and they could only guess what happened. Normally, we can see a chain of events in any aircraft accident. We learn from each accident and put preventative action in place. This is one of the more obscure accidents, which, without proven data, we can only attribute to a crocodile on the loose.