Here are photos of the first plane that landed in Nigeria.
It landed at 5:10pm on November 1, 1925 at Kano polo ground, outside Kano’s ancient walls.
That first air trip, led by the then Flight Lt. Coningham, began from Helwan (a town in Egypt) to Kano, with several stopovers with Egypt, Sudan and N’Djamena – then known as Fort Lamy.
In total, three planes landed at the end of the same day in Kano, the historic flights, involving three De Havilland DH 9A aircrafts belonging to the Royal Air Force, RAF.
Nigerians awaited the arrival of the aircraft with crowds of about 20,000 people who came to witness the landing.
Vincent Orange’s book, the “Coningham: A Biography of Air Marshal Sir Arthur Coningham”, vividly captured the expedition.
Kano residents only saw plane again ten years after the Coninghams’ departure when Imperial Airways aircraft landed during the reign of Emir Abdullahi Bayero in 1935.
Coningham who is the pilot that landed the first aircraft in Nigeria was presumed dead on January 30, 1948 when the airliner he was flying to Bermuda got missing off the coast of USA. His death remains one of the unsolved mysteries of the aviation history. His whereabouts is still not known till date.
