Penultimate Thursday, only one, out of three airlines that fly to Enugu from Lagos was able to operate. The other two cancelled their flights owing to poor terminal visibility caused by the current harmattan haze. Harmattan haze disrupts flight operations in Nigeria. In Nigeria, during Harmattan season, many flights are delayed, diverted or cancelled due to bad weather conditions; whereas airlines still fly at the height of the winter in Europe.
Modern aircraft have been built to land at zero visibility with corresponding landing aides. The Harmattan haze lowers visibility below sometimes-acceptable weather minima, depending on the airport. But never a time does it spread full darkness on the horizon or spread a sheet of dark fogs in the atmosphere, but each airline has its minimum acceptable visibility level, below which the airline could cancel flights.
The Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) has its minimum standard visibility between 700 to 1000 feet, depending on the airport. But industry experts who met on Tuesday at the 1st Anniversary Colloquium of Nigeria Travel Smart, an online medium, broached the effect of the Hammattan haze on travel and came to the conclusion that NCAA has failed to review its rule on visibility minima in response to technological advancement being recorded in air travels. They reasoned that regulatory body should look at the equipment of each airline and grant some of the airlines that have Next Generation aircraft the right to operate under low visibility, using the modern equipment in their aircraft.
But the snag really is on landing aids. Only four, out of the 22 airports in Nigeria have airfield lighting and these are the airports in Lagos, Abuja, Kano and Port Harcourt. There have been efforts made over the years to install airfield lighting at some airports in the country but such efforts end woefully as they were usually followed by scandals of huge sums of money diverted by government officials.
Ideally, runway construction goes with airfield lighting; so when the contract for runway is being awarded it is done simultaneously with the runway lighting project and as the runway is being worked on, the contractor for the airfield lighting would be installing underground cables. The idea of having runways without lighting system is an aberration and a later development, which signposts how low the country has fallen.
Industry experts opined that as a regulator of the industry, NCAA should bar flight operations in any airport that does not have airfield lighting. They argued that if such directive was in place, it would have prompted concerned authorities to prioritise the installation of runway lightings at the airports. But NCAA was too generous and allowed many airports in the country to operate without airfield lighting. The agency even allowed airports built by state governments to operate without runway lights.
A few years ago, NCAA inspected the runway at the Asaba airport in Delta state and even with the shortcomings at the runway, including unevenness of the surface, the regulatory body directed that the undulating topography around the runway should be removed for greater clearance. It thereafter approved that the airport should become operational without airfield lighting though it instructed that only small aircraft, turboprops should operate to the airport.
During the Yuletide season, many of the airports in Nigeria are very busy because many Nigerians return from overseas and from their working places in Nigeria to visit their kith and kin to celebrate the Christmas. Many Nigerians who plan to travel by air may not travel as scheduled because of Harmattan haze, which may lead to flight cancellations. The consequence is that a passenger who is billed to fly to any destination may not be sure whether the flight would take place or it would be cancelled.
Airlines lose huge resources to these cancellations and because flights cannot land in these airports beyond 6:00 pm, many passengers are left stranded at the airports. Some experts who spoke at the colloquium said NCAA could solve this problem by making it compulsory that every airport must have runway lighting.
A former head of the Nigerian Airspace Management Agency (NAMA) said that the colloquium that to prevent further cancellation of flights because of the Harmattan, NCAA should within the next seven days review the weather minima at the airports. He noted that with instrument landing system (ILS) and the Total Radar Coverage of Nigeria (TRACON) and terminal aids like Voice Ominidirectional Radio Range (VOR), weather minima could be reduced to 800 meters in some airports.
One of the resource persons at the event, who is also a pilot said that when modern aircraft are programmed, they could land at the centre of the runway even at the lowest visibility, but in Nigeria weather minima is determined by avoidable obstacles and clearance limit and that explains why every airport has a different level of visibility.
The review by NCAA, the source said, should be done so that weather minima would be made to appropriately match the available infrastructure at the airport.
What this means is that air travellers in Nigeria suffer terrible anguish due to the failure of concerned authorities to provide necessary infrastructure that could enable aircraft to land and take off even in low visibility caused by Harmattan haze.
“Harmattan cannot be a hazardous weather with the available technology. Airfield lighting is the major problem, if the problem of airfield lighting is solved, Harmattan would stop being a hindrance to flights during the Yuletide. But this problem should be solved because the airlines lose a lot of money,” an industry source said.
