- Robert Hayes, Nigeria’s first pilot, turned 90 without the national celebration he deserves
He planted the ambition as a fantasy as a student. He had no role model around. No pioneers do. But from the page of a London magazine he read in the library of Government College, Ughelli, he showed that dreams should not die when there is a will.
Robert Emmanuel Hayes turned an earthbound and teenage idea into a precedent as he became the first-ever Nigerian to fly a commercial plane. This same icon turned 90 on May 13.
As professions go, he flew not in metaphor but in fact. Hayes combined sheer will and good fortune. But the first seed was in the Illustrated ‘London News’. He absorbed an article about flying. His fancy took flight.
If there was no role model around him as a pilot, there were no airlines or airports around the school in Ughelli and in Sapele where he grew up.
When the colonial government dispatched labour officers to Ughelli to scout for graduating students, he forbade convention and did not want, like his mates, to be medical doctor, lawyer, accountant, etc. He peered skyward.
“Even my father wanted me to read medicine,” he said. Hayes turned down an admission to the University of London to read medicine after passing in flying colours at the Cambridge Certificate Examination in December, 1952. “I wanted to fly and discover the world,” he said.
Read Also: Capt Hayes is 2017 Karis award winner
The dream peeped into reality when he visited Lagos during holidays.
“Someone introduced me to Chief Bode Thomas,” he narrated. Chief Thomas was a prominent politician in the country. It was through him he met a British technocrat known as Coleman, an aviation affairs director in the ministry of communications.
With his support, he earned a scholarship to train as a pilot abroad. He distinguished himself and became the first person to qualify as a pilot in the country. Because it was still the colonial era, the airline in the region was West African Airways Corporation (WAC) covering Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra-Leone and The Gambia. Hayes joined WAC in 1955.
At independence in 1960, the Nigeria Airways gained autonomy from WAC. Other nations also formed theirs. He recalls that the Nigeria Airways placed a lot of emphasis on training. He flew across Africa, Middle East, Europe and the United States.
He turned a trainer of other pilots who joined the service. It was an era when pilots attracted great prestige. “We were very popular then and recognised,” he said.
The downside was the civil war, which did not only divide the country, it meant some of their staff, including Igbo pilots and other employees, could not work on their staff.
The “culture of the airline changed,” he recalled with regret, with the hiring of persons without requisite competence. “Persons with inadequate experience were hired,” he recalled, and the airline could not meet its schedules. “Experts were replaced by inexperienced people.”
It was also the time of corruption and chaos at airports. Securing tickets did not guarantee a seat on the aircraft. It was ‘molue’ on the air.
The management “could not meet our commitments in Europe, U.S.A and elsewhere.”
He flew for 44 years and his days in flight came to end in a period when the professionalism he helped build had run into decay. To fly for so many years without mishap is a thing for which he is forever grateful. Travels in his time predated the years of nightmares. Two air crashes happened in Nigeria in those days though, and they were in Kano and Kaduna. One was a Nigeria Airways flight and the other was the Royal Jordan Airlines.
He is a role model that Nigerians should be proud of, especially in an age of quick fixes and copycats. He ought to have received more attention than the routine silence that greeted his birthday.
