The Senate Committee on Aviation has said that Nigeria’s airspace is endangered by poor communication between the pilot and the air traffic control (TC) and non-functional and obsolete navigational aids.
Vice chairman of the Senate committee on aviation, Senator Bala Ibn Na Allah who is also a pilot spoke about the hard decisions pilots have to take everyday in order to fly safely through the airspace with inadequate navigational equipment, noting that ineffectively communication in the airspace has become inimical to air safety.
N’Allah recalled that these problems have been there over the years and despite huge amount of money spent on projects to improve safety in the airspace, the problems have continued to exist.
The Committee berated the Nigerian Airspace Management Agency (NAMA) and the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA), saying that the later failed in its oversight functions to regulate the airspace management agency, while decrying the billions of Naira spent on equipment procurement and execution without any discernible improvement in airspace safety.
Na’Allah observed that in the aviation industry contracts are inflated and when compared to other countries, a 10th of what is budget to execute a project in Nigeria is used to provide the best of similar project overseas, adding “The navigational aids we have in Ghana, Togo, Dakar, Senegal, we have spent five times of the money they spent, yet we are yet to have the kind of equipment they have. So when we talk about funds the problem is much more than that. Collectively we have failed, so individually let us correct those mistakes that we made in the past. We do not have the funds now. We will never have the kind of funds that we had in the past in the foreseeable future. So we need to change our attitude now.”
The Committee said it wants to look at the industry, the money the Senate appropriated to the different agencies and review the execution of the projects in line with the funds allocated to them.
However, the acting Managing Director of NAMA, Emma Anasi explained that paucity of funds have been the major factor for failure to implement projects in the agency and traced the history of communication and navigational aids in Nigeria airspace and noted that expansion and multiplication of airports and air routes hampered the effectiveness of these equipment, which was initially made for relatively limited part of the airspace.
He said major part of this problem would be solved if NAMA completes the on-going Aeronautical Information Service (AIS) automation, which is meant to improve communication in the airspace.
“When the project, which we call Aeronautical Information Service (AIS) automation was started it was designed to do two principal things. Create a V-SAT network in double redundant mode to enable us establish more extended VHF coverage sites and those sites are Benin, Calabar, Yola, Kaduna and many more. We have issues like that in Lagos, but this project by the time we finished it you can file your flight plan from you bedroom or from your cockpit because the network is web based. The network will also enable us to cover all the routes with radio communication to flight level 100. That is our target,” Anasi said.
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