Nigeria Airways Flight 2120 was a chartered passenger flight from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, to Sokoto, Nigeria, on 11 July 1991, which caught fire shortly after takeoff from King Abdulaziz International Airport and crashed while attempting to return for an emergency landing, killing all 247 passengers and 14 crew members on board.

At the time of the accident, it was being wet-leased to Nigeria Airways, which had in turn subleased it to Holdtrade Services to transport Nigerian pilgrims to and from Mecca.

This mix-up, a result of Captain Allan mistakenly identifying as "Nationair 2120" rather than "Nigerian 2120," lasted for three minutes,[5] but was ultimately found not to have had any effect on the outcome.

[3] Amidst this, First Officer Davidge, who had been flying C-GMXQ out, reported that he was losing hydraulics, prompting the crew to request a return to the airport for an emergency landing.

[3] The flight crew only became aware of the fire when in-flight director Kay Smith rushed into the cockpit reporting "smoke in the back ... real bad".

Allan informed Smith of the situation on the flight crew's end and, in reply to something not intelligible on the tape, told her "Yeah, just tell [the passengers] we'll be returning to, ah, Jeddah.

[7][3] When the aircraft was about 18 km (11 mi; 10 nmi) from the airport and at an altitude of 670 m (2,200 ft), a point where the landing gear could conceivably have been lowered, it began to experience an inflight breakup and the bodies of a number of people on board fell from it, indicating that the fire by that time had consumed, at least partially, the cabin floor.

[7] The latter stopped rotating "for reasons not established", and the subsequent friction of the wheel assembly with the runway generated sufficient heat to start a self-sustaining fire.

Due to common jet aircraft design, the accident became inevitable the moment the landing gear was retracted, mere seconds after takeoff and long before an emergency became apparent.

This meant that Nationair Canada executives had pressured the colleagues of the cockpit crew to withhold information that had serious safety implications.

[3] Soon after the accident, a group of Toronto-based Nationair Canada flight attendants pooled funds to create a memorial plaque, inscribed with the names of the victims.

The memorial, complete with a cherry tree planted to commemorate their colleagues who died in Jeddah, was given a permanent home at the head office of the Greater Toronto Airports Authority.

The lock-out lasted 15 months, and by the time it ended in early 1993, Nationair Canada found itself in severe financial trouble.