By Adesina Soyooye
The event which unfolded hours before the death of Helicopter Pilot, Ernest Prudence Chika, on Friday, August 28, 2020, in a crash, is strange than fiction. It’s so uncanny, so eerie.
Recall that a Helicopter, belonging to Quorum Aviation Limited, crashed in-between two residential buildings on Salvation Road, Opebi Area of Ikeja, Lagos.
The flight took off from Porthacourt, Rivers State, and was two minutes away from landing at the Lagos airport when it crashed.
Captain Chika, and Engr Clement Ndiok, died on the spot, while another unnamed soul, died at the Lagos State University Teaching Hospital, LASUTH, hours later.
What was not immediately known to the members of the public was the eerie pranks played by the Captain and his colleagues in PH hours before the crash.
In a video which is gradually going viral, Chika was seen inside a large bag, not quite zipped up.
They were about four in the room. A colleague of his, a white man, was trying to carry the bag, with Chika inside, while they were all chanting: “Chika must go, Chika must go”. They were laughing.
Then, the Captain, lifted his head, laughing too, and said: “I am not going anywhere ooo. I have no visa.”
They were said to have stayed up till about 10.pm that Thursday. On Friday, he took off to Lagos, crashed, died, and finally, ended up in a bag, this time, a real body bag, securing an unwanted visa out of mother-earth.
Not a few people have wondered about the coincidence between Captain Chika, alive, joking in a bag, and Captain Chika in a real body bag, a few hours later. Destiny? A bad joke? Or what?
Thousands of Nigerians have hailed him as a hero. In the thores of a terrible emergency, wavering and dangling between life and death, he had the presence of mind to de-fuel the helicopter, and did everything to avoid crashing into a school, a market, on the road with several cars plying, or a Church.
He managed to crash in between two buildings, killed nobody on ground. Only three of them inside the helicopter died.
Meanwhile, aviation investigators have gone to work, to unravel the cause of the accident, just as Aviation authorities have denied speculations that the helicopter was not airworthy. They insist it was.
On a visit to the crash site on Saturday, Lagos State Governor, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, promised to help those whose homes were affected to get their lives back.
