Nigerian tycoon Kola Karim’s private jet loses its door minutes after takeoff

A private jet owned by Nigerian oil and power tycoon Kola Karim lost a door shortly after taking off from Abuja on Thursday, forcing the crew to declare an emergency and return to the airport, in an incident aviation experts say points to a maintenance failure on the 24-year-old aircraft.

The Bombardier Challenger 604, registered T7-SEI, left Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport for Lagos at 4:12 p.m. UTC on Oct. 15. About three nautical miles from the airport, while climbing through 3,500 feet, the crew issued a Mayday call after the door separated from the aircraft, according to the Nigerian Safety Investigation Bureau. The jet turned back and landed safely on Runway 22 at 4:34 p.m., 22 minutes after departure.

Three crew members and six passengers were on board. The bureau said all nine were accounted for, and no injuries have been reported. Airport fire and medical teams were placed on standby before the jet landed.

The aircraft belongs to Karim and is operated by Triton Aviation, a Lagos-based air charter company. The plane was built in 2002.

Aviation experts who spoke to Billionaires.Africa said the incident was a maintenance issue. Doors on business jets are secured by a series of latches and locking pins that are inspected during routine maintenance checks. A door coming off in flight, they said, indicates a failure in how the aircraft was kept rather than a design flaw in the Challenger 604, one of the most widely used large business jets in the world. The investigation has not yet published any findings, and Triton Aviation has not commented publicly.

Investigators recover the door

The door came down on farmland near Abuja and has been retrieved.

"The door has been recovered and secured at the NSIB wreckage hangar," Alex Badeh Jr., director general of the bureau, said in a statement on Friday. The agency "has commenced its investigation to establish the circumstances surrounding the occurrence" and will provide updates as the work progresses, he said.

The Nigeria Civil Aviation Authority confirmed the incident and referred questions to the bureau, which leads investigations into serious incidents and accidents in Nigerian airspace. Neither agency has said which door separated or what caused it to come off.

The Challenger 604 is a twin-engine, wide-cabin jet made by Canada's Bombardier and was produced from the mid-1990s until it was replaced by the Challenger 605 in 2006. At 24, Karim's plane is older than many of the jets still flying in Nigeria's private fleet, and age raises the maintenance burden. Older airframes need more frequent structural inspections, parts are harder to source and heavy checks take longer and cost more.

Maintenance gaps in Nigeria's private fleet

The incident puts a spotlight on how Nigeria's private jets are maintained. The country has few facilities equipped to carry out heavy maintenance on business jets, so owners routinely fly their aircraft abroad for major checks.

"There are limited OEM-aligned or fully equipped MRO facilities in Nigeria," Oluwaseun Ayodeji, chief operating officer of Nigerian business aviation company VMO Aero, said in April, using the industry term for maintenance, repair and overhaul. He said most heavy maintenance is still sent to Europe, Mexico or the U.S., and that because maintenance work and spare parts are paid for in dollars, foreign exchange shortages can delay payments and disrupt maintenance schedules. Spare parts are also often held up in customs, even when they are needed urgently, he said.

Those pressures have grown since 2023, when the naira lost most of its value against the dollar after the government ended its currency peg. Nigeria's only major national hangar project, an aircraft maintenance center first proposed more than a decade ago, has yet to be completed.

Oversight is another weak spot. Most private jets based in Nigeria are registered abroad. Of 73 business jets based in Lagos and Abuja last year, 25 carried Nigerian registrations, according to aviation fleet data. Nine, including Karim's, were registered in San Marino, whose "T7" prefix has become popular with private jet owners. Under international aviation rules, the country where an aircraft is registered is responsible for certifying its airworthiness, which leaves aircraft such as Karim's largely outside the direct day-to-day supervision of Nigeria's regulator.

The government has been pushing owners to bring their jets onto the local register. A ministerial task force set up in June 2024 by Aviation Minister Festus Keyamo found that the dominance of foreign-registered jets kept much of the fleet beyond close scrutiny by the Nigeria Civil Aviation Authority. In 2024, the regulator suspended the permits of three private jet operators for running illegal commercial charters, and in June 2025, the Nigeria Customs Service briefly grounded about 60 foreign-registered business jets at Lagos and Abuja over unpaid import duties.

Door failures have caused alarm in Nigeria before. In February 2018, an emergency exit door on a Dana Air passenger jet fell off as the plane landed in Abuja. The airline said a passenger had tampered with it, and the regulator cleared the aircraft to fly again after repairs.

Karim's energy business

Karim is group managing director and chief executive of Shoreline Energy International, an industrial group he has built over about two decades. The group has interests in oil and gas, power, engineering, infrastructure, telecommunications and agriculture.

Its biggest asset is OML 30, an onshore oil block in the Niger Delta. Shoreline Natural Resources, the group's upstream arm, bought a 45% stake in the block from Shell, Total and Eni in 2012 in a joint venture with Heritage Oil, in a deal valued at $850 million. The license includes the Trans Forcados pipeline, which carries crude to the Forcados export terminal.

Karim has been raising money this year to expand production. In September, Shoreline secured a $500 million Islamic financing package arranged by Qatar Islamic Bank to fund drilling on OML 30, with a goal of lifting output above 100,000 barrels a day by the end of 2027. In June, the group took a $200 million facility from the African Export-Import Bank, mostly to fund development of the Hassi Bir Rekaiz field in Algeria. Shoreline also bought producing oil assets in the United States earlier this year.