AIR traffic controllers at Lagos airport lost contact yesterday with a Boeing 727 airliner with 132 passengers and nine crew members on board, said Nigeria's ADC airlines, which operated the domestic flight.
Search efforts were being mounted to find the aircraft, the air carrier said in a statement, without giving details.
The aircraft, on a flight from Port Harcourt, capital of Rivers state in southern Nigeria, went missing shortly before it was due to land.
Boeing 727s are three engine jets which, depending on the model, can carry 134 to 187 passengers for ranges of up to 5,600 km (3,500 miles).
Yesterday's flight had left Port Harcourt around 4:30 p.m. local time (3.30 p.m. Irish time) and was due to arrive in Lagos - Nigeria's commercial capital - an hour later, an airline official said.
At 5:05 p.m. the control tower at Murtala Mohammed airport in Lagos lost contact with the aircraft, the airline's statement said.
ADC has a reputation of being one of Nigeria's most reliable airlines.
The last major air accident in Nigeria happened on June 20th, when a privately owned aircraft with 12 people on board crashed shortly before landing at the central town of Jos.
It was on a flight to Jos from the northern city of Kano, with the military administrator of Kano state, Col Mohamed Wase, among the passengers. No one survived the crash.
. An electronic malfunction that activated an engine thrust reverser caused last week's downing of a Fokker 100 aircraft in Sao Paulo, Brazil which killed 98 people, a newspaper reported yesterday.
O Estado de Sao Paulo, citing a source who had access to information on the plane's Flight Data Recorder, said the malfunction caused the Fokker's right turbine to reverse its thrust during takeoff. Normally, the thrust reverser, designed to reverse the direction of the engine's thrust, is only used on landings to help bring the plane to a stop.
The report was consistent with eyewitnesses at the airport who said they saw the thrust reverser on the plane's right turbine deploy automatically as the aircraft sped down the runway.