This week’s update
A couple of updates:
- Air Nigeria will not commence its new route to Johannesburg tomorrow. The embattled airline has difficulty to honour its agreement with EgyptAir, which would provide a second A330-200 for the route. The aircraft (SU-GCJ) is still parked at Cairo. Earlier this week, Air Nigeria fired twelve pilots and engineers who were involved in the strike action of three weeks ago. If Air Nigeria doesn’t return back into the skies soon, it may well be the end of the road for the airline. With the exposed mismanagement and lack of political support, it’s difficult to see a way back for the airline.
- Apparently, Arik Air had to do some overdue maintenance on its CRJ900 fleet. 5N-JEA, -JEB, -JEC and -JED were all flown to Cologne for maintenance by Lufthansa Technik this month.
- A good report on the efforts of the Federal Government to get back control over Murtala Muhammed Airport Terminal 2.
- Nasarawa State is also planning a cargo airport in Karu near Abuja; the State earlier began work on a passenger airport near Lafia.
- Two aviation associations worth mentioning: APWEN and Women in Aviation – Nigeria Chapter.
- Enough is Enough started a website called AirWatchNigeria, where air travellers can record their experiences in the Nigerian aviation sector.
Aviation in Nigeria 
The Airwatch effort is essentially things a well oiled NCAA should have been handling. But since it’s clear that citizens can’t depend on the FG for everything and are increasingly taking responsibility, this is a welcome development.
They should publish and edit the complaints on the website. A critical approach is necessary, as travellers are frigtened and the local press tends to report every minor incident as being a ‘serious mishap’ or ‘near crash’.
From a quick scan, the happenings in air transport is just another manifestation of known trends in the general consumer protection landscape.
Depending on how thoroughly Airwatch intends to approach this, a lot could be adopted from the best practices.
Recent occurence narrated by a traveller of how passengers were made to board a hot 737 without it having been pre-cooled (not sure if there were APU issues), then the passengers were deplaned, only to later be asked to board without any rerasonable explanation. And of course, the flight was late.
This is by no means a one-off event.
So they have a good shot to help if they take a good scientific approach and not along the activist line, though like a lot of nigerians, they’re fed up with poor service.
Problem in Nigeria is the financial environment is wrong place to invest heavily in aviation, the returns are not there, over regulated in terms of financial operations such as APD, duty on spares, high fuel costs and air fares that are not reflective of doing business, saturation on PHC/Abuja/LOS triangle where traffic is at its highest. The problem of obtaining hard currency such as USD which is standard currency for avaition, highest bird strikes in aviation, effecting insurance costs etc etc etc.
Arik tried to offer more than the classic triangle but without significant growth in local trade, tourism and economic diversification, the situation won’t change drastically for some time.