January 29, 2025, was a Wednesday. The aircraft, registration 5X-RHB, was a 23-year-old twin-engine turboprop owned by Uganda's Eagle Air and leased since 2017 to Light Air Services. Its life before had been unglamorous: built for and operated by Air New Zealand from 2002 to 2016, then sold to Eagle, then stored, then leased to fly oil charters in South Sudan. Nineteen passengers and two pilots boarded at GPOC Unity Airstrip for the scheduled run to Juba International Airport. Sixteen of the passengers were South Sudanese oil workers. One was Indian. Two were Chinese. The two pilots were Ugandan. Their employer was the Greater Pioneer Oil Company, a consortium of China National Petroleum Corporation and South Sudan's Nile Petroleum Corporation. They were going home at the end of a rotation.

Around 10:30 in the morning, roughly ten minutes into the flight, the aircraft lost height and struck the ground. Witnesses reported the wing separation. Photographs from the site showed the fuselage inverted and debris scattered widely - the pattern of an airframe that has come apart in flight rather than one that has struck terrain intact. Twenty people died, including two who survived the initial impact and reached hospital but whose injuries overwhelmed them. The sole survivor, the South Sudanese engineer, was airlifted to Bentiu. The bodies of the victims were flown to a morgue in Juba. Initial media reports put the toll at eighteen; the final figure, confirmed by Unity State's information minister Gatwech Bipal, was twenty.

Ter Manyang Gatwech, who runs the Center for Peace and Advocacy in Juba, said what many families were already saying. South Sudan's Civil Aviation Authority had not been enforcing safety standards. Aging and outdated aircraft were flying routinely in the country's skies because the enforcement infrastructure was absent. In a country where most overland travel is impossible in the wet season, where oil revenues fund the state and oil workers need to move, aircraft flown by small operators with thin maintenance margins had become the only practical transport. The Beechcraft 1900D that came apart over Unity State was just one of many of that profile. The engineer who lived, strapped into his seat inverted and alive against all odds, had no way to know why his plane had not held together.

The National Minister of Transport's air-crash investigation department recovered the flight recorder from the wreckage and sent it to the United States for analysis. On 7 March, New Zealand's Transport Accident Investigation Commission opened an overseas assistance inquiry - not because the aircraft was New Zealand-registered at the time, but because Air New Zealand had owned it from 2002 to 2016, and the TAIC was helping recover historical maintenance records. Singapore's Transport Safety Investigation Bureau joined the effort. The investigation would, eventually, identify what had caused a wing to separate from a twin-turboprop in routine flight. The families waiting in Juba and in Chinese and Indian and Ugandan households knew what they had already lost.

The oil fields of Unity State sit on the flat, seasonally flooded plains of the Greater Upper Nile region - one of the poorest parts of one of the world's poorest countries, and one of its richest in crude. The Unity oilfield gave the state its name. Production keeps the state functioning and keeps the country's budget from collapsing; the infrastructure that serves production is precarious. Bentiu, the state capital, houses a United Nations protection-of-civilians site for tens of thousands of displaced people. The airstrip the Beechcraft took off from was a working oilfield strip. It is quiet now, as it often is in the week after a crash.