The Director General of the Nigerian Meteorological Agency (NIMET), Professor Bako Mansur Matazu, has raised an alarm over the vandalisation of its weather equipment located at different airports in the country and warned that such damage would erode accurate weather forecast, which is critical for air safety.
According to industry experts, 35 per cent of general aviation accidents are caused by weather and 75 per cent of those mishaps involve fatalities.
Also in Nigeria, most of the tragic accidents recorded had weather contribution to them and that has prompted the federal government to deploy more funds to NIMET to purchase equipment and modernise its facilities, including the Doppler Weather Radar and others.
Professor said when he started work as Director General in April this year the first challenge he faced was the effect of the vandalisation of NIMET’s safety- critical equipment, which could rode accurate weather prediction that pilots need in order to operate safely.
He said that the wind shear alert system equipment costs N100 million and when damaged it costs about N55 million to repair and wind shear is dangerous type of weather that operates at the low level of the airspace, which affects flights and had caused the crash of many aircraft, including the well-known Sosoliso Airlines Flight 1145 that crashed at the Port Harcourt Airport runway on December 10, 2005.
The NIMET Director General who made this known in interview with THISDAY at the weekend, said: “Basically, the major challenge I encountered immediately on arrival at NIMET was the issue of vandalisation of our airport safety equipment across the country. In order to reduce the risk of negative weather phenomenon like low level wind shear system and other possible moving weather system, NIMET installed instruments, which are very sensitive and capital intensive like Doppler weather radar system, Runway Visual Range (RVR) across all our 24 airports and specifically for the four major airports, we have independent weather forecast offices.”
He said some of these instruments have sensors installed in them, even at airports that have perimeter fences, “we have very serious challenges of vandalisation and I will give an example of this. Low Level Wind shear Alert System (LLWAS) has eight sensors, if more than three are down, it will not give a clear picture of the wind shear and this is a major hazard to aircraft either landing or taking off.”
With such frightening situation, Matazu said the agency came up with a model of integrating communities around in securing some of these installations, disclosing that his administration instituted a task team on airport operations and part of the task of the team was to engage host communities where the airports are located, urging them to help secure the NIMET equipment and provided them with incentives to do that.
“On the other hand, we came up with an alternative method of monitoring and forecasting these wind shear without using a sensor, rather we use a Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) system. Since I came onboard, we have spent a lot of money in upgrading our Numerical Weather Prediction Department with the assistance of Weather Meteorological Organisation (WMO) and out of these, we have what is called Satellite Milecasting Facility and this milecasting is giving us a diagnostic analysis of any cloud over Nigeria and we believe we can detect also the possibility of the potential of any airport being affected by wind shear.”
“So, we are complementing these two and it is giving us a very clear result. In the first phase, we are earmarking 10 airports and out of the 10 airports, three have been addressed now and we are doing the other two in the next two weeks. We intend to cover the 10 airports before the end of the year and by the first quarter of next year; we are going to address the remaining airports,” he said.
