The Accident Investigation Bureau (AIB) is partnering the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) of the United States of America for a one-week training in accident/incident investigation, for the benefit of the entire West African sub region.
Spokesman of AIB, Tunji Oketumbi said the workshop to be facilitated by the two international organisations, seeks to deepen the knowledge, and sharpen the skills of the participants drawn from AIB, Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA), domestic airlines and members of the Banjul Accord Group Accident Investigation Agency (BAGAIA).
Tagged ICAO Accident/Incident Investigation Workshop, the training, scheduled to hold in Lagos from September 25, 2017, would navigate the participants through various aspects of accident investigation including Annex 13 guidance materials; investigating organisational factors and human performance; records investigation; investigating rotorcraft accidents and incidents; on-site investigation and flight recorders.
The training will also cover fire investigation, managing large scale accident and incident investigation, emergency response and record investigation among others. The facilitators include the Managing Director of NTSB, Mr. Dennis Jones who for many years was the NTSB representative in Africa and Mr. Andre de Kock from ICAO.
The current management in AIB has made capacity development one its cardinal programmes and has been galvanising several quarters and partnering various global organisations to ensure that investigators are adequately trained. This workshop is one of the fallouts of such deft moves.
The Commissioner/CEO of AIB, Akin Olateru said: “We are very pleased to be partnering with ICAO and NTSB on this important training. We value the cooperation and technical assistance we have been receiving from these organisations, which would greatly complement our efforts to make AIB formidable. Capacity development, infrastructural improvement, system and process re-engineering remain our focus in making sure that AIB contributes meaningfully to aviation safety for the common good of all.”
As a follow up to the classroom experience, AIB investigators trained at this workshop would be constituted into two teams and would proceed on ‘On the Job Training’ (OJT) with NTSB in the United States and the Transportation Safety Board (TSB) in Singapore. While the first team proceeds to the NTSB sometime in October 2017, on their return the next team would proceed to Singapore in November 2017.
