The flight

The captain was Benjamin Adekunle Adebayo, a Nigerian. The first officer was Gerad Yakubu Andan, a Ghanaian.

The crashed DC-9 was owned by JAT Airways, and operated by Sosoliso Airlines Ltd. This is the first accident for the airline.

The accident occurred during approach to Port Harcourt in adverse weather - windshear, rain and lightning. Unable to make out the unlit runway through the rain, the captain called for a go around (missed approach) at an altitude of about 200 ft (approximately 120 ft above the ground). This call was made about 100 ft below the "decision altitude". The missed approach procedure was carried out incorrectly, and the aircraft struck the ground approximately 70 meters left of the runway. It collided heavily with a concrete drainage culvert, disintegrated and caught fire.

Many passengers survived the initial impact and died in the resulting fire. Port Harcourt Airport had one fire truck and no ambulances.

Victims

All seven crew members and 101 of the 103 passengers died in the crash, or later from their injuries. The two surviving passengers were seriously injured.

Among the passengers were about sixty one secondary school students from Loyola Jesuit College in the Federal Capital Territory region of Nigeria. At first Loyola Jesuit College students from Port Harcourt traveled between school and their homes via buses using the roads. Rising crime along roads during the 1990s made parents believe that road travel was too dangerous. In 2001, when Sosoliso Airlines began services between Port Harcourt and Abuja parents placed their children on the flights.

Among the victims were two volunteers for Medecins Sans Frontieres/Doctors Without Borders en route to work in Port Harcourt, Hawah Kamara and Thomas Lamy, as well as televangelist Bimbo Odukoya, pastor of the Fountain of Life Church, who succumbed to her injuries the day after the accident.

One survivor, Kechi Okwuchi, was treated in Milpark Hospital at Johannesburg, South Africa as of 14 December 2005  and at Shriners Hospitals for Children in Galveston, Texas, United States as of 6 September 2007.

Legacy

Andy and Ify Ilabor, the parents of crash victims Chuka, Nkem, and Busonma "Buso" Ilabor, started a foundation called the Ilabor Angels to assist orphans and AIDS victims.

Loyola Jesuit dedicated a Memorial Hall to the dead students.

The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) mandates that each family of an air crash victim is entitled to only 3 million naira or US$18,157 from the airline. In January 2009 Harold Demuren, the director general of the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA), said that the families of the air crash victims would be compensated and that Sosoliso had already paid $2.3 million into an escrow account to compensate the families.