"The Bird Came From Your Airport": Air Peace Flight 5N-CEF, Osubi Airport, and a Dispute That Exposes the Gaps in Nigeria's Aviation Safety Reporting Culture

On the afternoon of Friday, June 5, 2026, an Air Peace Embraer E-195 aircraft operating as flight 5N-CEF touched down at Osubi Airport in Warri, Delta State, on the final leg of a service from Lagos. The flight crew managed a safe landing, after which the aircraft was immediately handed over to the airline's ground engineering team. Air Peace Flight 5N-CEF, an E-195 aircraft, reported observing evidence of a bird strike during the pilot's inspection of the aircraft after landing. The bird was stuck on the landing gear. What followed that discovery — a public statement by Air Peace, a sharp public rebuttal from the airport's own management, a dispute about where exactly the bird met the aircraft, and a silence from the aviation regulator that should be asking and answering those questions — tells a story about Nigerian domestic aviation safety culture that extends well beyond a single incident at a single airport in Delta State. 

Air Peace disclosed the development in a statement issued on Friday by its spokesperson, Osifo-Whiskey Efe, explaining that the aircraft was immediately withdrawn from service for safety inspections after the incident. According to the airline, engineers conducted preliminary assessments upon the aircraft's arrival and identified the need for additional examinations of the landing gear. "Preliminary inspections revealed the need for further checks on the landing gear, necessitating the grounding of the aircraft in accordance with established aviation safety procedures," the statement said. As a result of the development, Air Peace announced the cancellation of the aircraft's scheduled return flight from Osubi to Lagos. The carrier confirmed that it is taking full responsibility for the welfare of the stranded passengers while logistics are being sorted out. The airline confirmed that it had arranged full hotel accommodations within Osubi for the affected travelers. 

The airline's public statement was measured, procedurally correct, and entirely consistent with international aviation safety standards. A bird strike is a declared hazard. A bird found lodged in a landing gear assembly after landing is evidence of a collision between the aircraft and wildlife during some phase of the flight, most likely during approach and touchdown. The landing gear — with its complex hydraulic systems, structural load-bearing components, and intricate mechanical linkages — is precisely the system that a bird strike during the landing roll or approach phase can affect. Grounding the aircraft and cancelling the return service was not overcaution. It was the only appropriate response.

What Air Peace did not anticipate was that its public disclosure of the incident — a straightforward statement of what happened, what was found, and what was done about it — would be publicly disputed by the very airport at which the aircraft had just landed.

Winston Egwuatu, manager of Osubi Airstrip, strongly disputed the claim, noting that the airport had recently achieved a major safety milestone. "In any case, and for your information, Osubi Airport recently celebrated almost two years of zero bird strikes at the airport. It is a major milestone in airport operations nationwide," Egwuatu said. That statistic — nearly two years without a recorded bird strike — is the centrepiece of Osubi's defence of its own operational record, and it should be stated for exactly what it is: an achievement worth taking seriously, in a Nigerian airport environment where bird strikes are a documented, chronic, and in some cases tragically consequential hazard. Osubi has been working on its wildlife hazard management programme, and that work appears to have produced results. The airport management's pride in that achievement is understandable and legitimate. 

But the manner in which that achievement is being deployed in this dispute deserves careful scrutiny. Egwuatu said: "On this alleged report, I like to strongly refute and to say that preliminary investigation by the airport has revealed the said strike did not happen at Osubi Airport. We believe that the operating aircraft picked the bird from the departing airport." The formulation is notable. The airport manager is not saying the bird strike did not happen — the physical evidence, a bird lodged in the landing gear, makes that an untenable position. He is saying the bird strike did not happen at Osubi. The bird, he asserts, was picked up by the aircraft at Lagos's Murtala Muhammed International Airport, where the flight originated, and was carried to Warri in the landing gear's recesses, only to be discovered after the aircraft landed at Osubi. 

It is a hypothesis. It is not impossible. Aircraft occasionally carry birds in wheel wells and landing gear assemblies for portions of a flight, particularly if the bird is incapacitated or trapped rather than killed outright on impact. But it is a hypothesis that requires significant evidential support to be credible, and the evidence Egwuatu offered for it rests on a specific and significant inconsistency between two accounts of what the pilot reported.

According to the airstrip manager, the pilot informed airport officials that he heard a sound about 200 metres while approaching Osubi airport, although the Incident/Bird Strike Information System report reportedly placed the occurrence at about 50 feet above the runway threshold. "The pilot never reported hearing sounds on approach to Air Traffic Control, neither has he reported any bird strike to ATC until now," Egwuatu said. 

The IBIS report — the Incident/Bird Strike Information System — placed the occurrence at approximately 50 feet above the runway threshold. Fifty feet above the runway threshold is, by definition, within the operational environment of Osubi Airport. A bird strike at 50 feet above the runway threshold at Osubi is a bird strike at Osubi, regardless of what the pilot did or did not report to ATC in real time. The pilot's verbal account to airport officials — that he heard a sound 200 metres from the airport — is consistent with the aircraft being on short final approach inside the aerodrome's immediate operational envelope. Two hundred metres from a runway threshold, on approach to land, is not somewhere else. It is, functionally, within Osubi Airport's operating environment.

The question of why the pilot did not report the sound to ATC during approach is being used by the airport manager as evidence that the strike did not occur at Osubi. But the absence of a real-time ATC report does not establish that the strike occurred elsewhere. Pilots experiencing unusual sounds during approach are focused on a high-workload phase of flight — gear down, flaps configured, airspeed managed, approach path maintained — and a single audible event that does not immediately produce any flight control anomaly may not trigger an immediate ATC report. The subsequent discovery of a bird in the landing gear, combined with the pilot's recollection of an audible sound during approach, is far more consistent with a strike on short final at Osubi than with a bird that survived a Lagos takeoff, a cruise segment, and an Osubi approach entirely undetected until post-landing inspection.

Egwuatu added that wildlife hazard control officers carried out inspections before and after the aircraft's arrival, but found no evidence of bird activity around the runway. "It is possible that the pilot picked the bird 200 metres, as he told us before the station manager and head of operations, or elsewhere, but not within Osubi Aerodrome," he said. The absence of a carcass or feathers on the runway after the aircraft landed is being cited as evidence that the strike did not occur at Osubi. But a bird struck by an aircraft on approach at 50 feet above the threshold, at an approach speed of approximately 130 to 140 knots for an E-195 on final, would not necessarily leave significant runway debris. The bird was found on the landing gear. Its physical evidence travelled with the aircraft, not onto the runway surface. 

Egwuatu also dismissed reports suggesting that Air Peace had suspended operations to Osubi, saying the airport had not received any such notification. "We are not aware of any suspension of operations of Air Peace at Osubi Airport. You may need to crosscheck your information with Air Peace," he added. Meanwhile, the said aircraft departed safely at about 1450hrs. The fact that the aircraft subsequently departed Osubi — after completing its safety inspections and being cleared for service — is a positive safety outcome. It confirms that Air Peace's grounding of the aircraft was precautionary in the best sense: they stopped, they checked, they found what they were looking for, they assessed the situation, and when the aircraft was cleared they resumed operations. That is exactly how the system is supposed to work. 

What the system is not supposed to produce is a public dispute between an airline and an airport about whose territory a bird strike occurred in, conducted through press releases and media statements, while the aviation regulator — the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority — remains silent. The NCAA is Nigeria's principal aviation safety oversight body. Bird strike incidents are reportable events under Nigerian aviation regulations, mirroring the mandatory reporting frameworks of ICAO Annex 13 and the standards maintained by aviation authorities globally. When a bird is found lodged in the landing gear of a commercial aircraft after landing, a formal investigation process should be initiated, evidence should be collected, and a determination should be made through regulated channels — not through competing public statements from the airline and the airport manager.

The NCAA's silence in the days between Air Peace's June 5 statement and this article's publication is the most troubling aspect of this entire episode. The dispute between Air Peace and Osubi Airport Management is precisely the kind of factual disagreement that a functioning regulatory investigation is designed to resolve. The IBIS data, the ATC recordings from Osubi approach, the maintenance records and engineering inspection findings from the aircraft, the wildlife survey logs from Osubi Airport's hazard control officers, and the meteorological and ornithological data about bird activity patterns in the Warri-Osubi corridor on the afternoon of June 5, 2026 — all of these are available to investigators. All of them together are sufficient to establish, with reasonable certainty, at which point in the flight the bird struck the aircraft. That determination should be made by trained investigators with access to all available evidence, not by airport managers and airline spokespersons through the Nigerian press.

The broader context matters enormously. Nigerian aviation has been on a safety improvement trajectory that is real, measurable, and worth protecting. The NCAA's Continuous Airworthiness Management Organisation framework, the implementation of Safety Management Systems at major airports, and the improvements in Air Peace's own operational culture since its founding in 2013 have all contributed to an environment in which Nigerian carriers are taken more seriously by the international aviation community than they were a decade ago. That trajectory is not served by allowing a safety incident to become a reputational dispute between institutions rather than a factual investigation that produces shared knowledge and genuine safety improvement.

Osubi Airport's two-year zero bird strike record is, as its manager says, a genuine achievement. But an achievement does not become a permanent protection against bird strike risk, and treating a reported strike as a reputational threat to be refuted rather than a safety event to be investigated honestly is a response that prioritises institutional pride over institutional safety. If the NCAA's investigation ultimately determines that the bird was indeed carried from Lagos rather than struck at Osubi, the airport's record will be validated through an authoritative process rather than defended through a press statement. That outcome serves Osubi's interests better than the current dispute. And if the investigation determines that the strike occurred on approach to Osubi, the airport management will have the opportunity to understand what element of their wildlife hazard programme was insufficient and to correct it — which is the entire point of a safety reporting culture.

Air Peace did what a safety-conscious airline should do. They found evidence of a bird strike. They grounded the aircraft. They cancelled the return service. They provided accommodation for stranded passengers. They issued a transparent public statement. They inspected the aircraft and returned it to service when it was safe to do so. "At Air Peace, safety remains our foremost priority. While disruptions of this nature are regrettable, every operational decision is guided by our unwavering commitment to the highest standards of safety and regulatory compliance." Those words should not have to share a news cycle with a public institutional dispute about where the bird came from. 

The question of where 5N-CEF met its bird on the afternoon of June 5 is a question the NCAA should now answer, through investigation, in the interest of every future flight operating in Nigerian airspace.

Sources

1. TheCable — Warri Airport Manager Disputes Air Peace Bird Strike Claim, Says No Evidence Found on Runway — https://www.thecable.ng/warri-airport-manager-disputes-air-peace-bird-strike-claim-says-no-evidence-found-on-runway/
2. Daily Post Nigeria — Osubi Airport Refutes Bird Strike Allegation, Cites Two-Year Safety Record — https://dailypost.ng/2026/06/07/osubi-airport-refutes-bird-strike-allegation-cites-two-year-safety-record/
3. The Tide News Online — Warri Airport Manager Disputes Air Peace Bird Strike Claim — https://www.thetidenewsonline.com/2026/06/warri-airport-manager-disputes-air-peace-bird-strike-claim/
4. Tribune Online — Osubi Airport Denies Air Peace Bird Strike Claim, Says Incident Occurred Elsewhere — https://tribuneonlineng.com/osubi-airport-denies-air-peace-bird-strike-claim-says-incident-occurred-elsewhere/
5. TheNigerian — Air Peace Cancels Warri-Lagos Flight After Bird Strike Incident — https://thenigerian.news/2026/06/06/air-peace-cancels-warri-lagos-flight-after-bird-strike-incident/
6. Sahara Reporters — Air Peace Grounds Aircraft, Cancels Warri-Lagos Flight Following Bird Strike — https://saharareporters.com/2026/06/06/air-peace-grounds-aircraft-cancels-warri-lagos-flight-following-bird-strike
7. The Interviews Nigeria — Air Peace Cancels Warri-Lagos Flight After Bird Strike Incident — https://www.theinterviewsng.com/air-peace-cancels-warri-lagos-flight-after-bird-strike-incident/
8. Daily Post Nigeria — Air Peace Cancels Warri-Lagos Flight After Bird Strike Incident — https://dailypost.ng/2026/06/06/air-peace-cancels-warri-lagos-flight-after-bird-strike-incident/
9. Sago Gist — Air Peace Cancels Warri-Lagos Flight After Bird Strike Incident — https://www.sagagist.com.ng/2026/06/air-peace-cancels-warri-lagos-flight.html
10. Warri Sentinel / WS News — Osubi Airport Denies Air Peace Bird Strike Claim — https://www.warrisentinel.com/osubi-airport-denies-air-peace-bird-strike-claim/