Chinedu Eze
The Director General of the Nigeria Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA), Captain Musa Nuhu has explained that the bane of domestic airline operation is lack of capacity and to overcome this challenge, new airlines must have a minimum of six aircraft before they are allowed to go into operation.
Before the new policy, airlines could start flight service with only two aircraft and the consequence of the policy then was that if one aircraft breaks down, the airline would be left with only one aircraft and according to the regulation, an airline that owns only one aircraft cannot operate schedule service.
In recent years domestic airlines have suffered low capacity, selling the number of seats that cannot meet air travellers’ and this and this has contributed to high airfares.
Captain Nuhu in a zoom meeting with Aviation Correspondents during the weekend said that the decision to increase the minimum equipment to six aircraft is to overcome the problem of lack of capacity.
“The problem is that a lot of the airlines don’t even have the capacity to meet current financial obligations. If you have three aircraft for instance and you lose one out of it, it has become a problem to meet up with your operations. Then, you start to have issues of flight delays, cancellations and all that. The number of aircraft you will have will depend on the kind of operations you want to do. You can imagine somebody who comes in with just one or two aircraft and one of the aircraft goes out of business, and sell tickets to the passengers, think of what will happen. For you to have six aircraft, it shows you have very strong financial backgrounds of running an airline,” Nuhu said.
He further explained that the new policy is not only for new start-ups but also for existing operators, disclosing that the existing operators have been given deadline on when to comply with the policy.
“It is not only for new entrants, but the old ones too have a period by which they have to comply. If everybody has one or two aircraft, we will keep having this recurrent problem. We have to avoid that. People will criticize, but every country is different. We have to look at our own peculiar history and try and come with solutions, but regulations are not cast in stones. If the situation changes, the regulation would be reviewed accordingly. Whenever it is necessary, we don’t have to wait for five years before we make amendments, ”he said.
Nuhu said Nigeria has many airlines but few of them are operating and the ones that are operating do not have many aircraft, noting that any airline that can afford to acquire six aircraft has the financial muscle and the capacity to operate schedule service and with such capacity it would not go under after few years, while still having its name in the NCAA registry.
“There are more aircraft in Nigeria registry than the entire west African states. The number of airlines, AOC (Air Operator Certificate), airports and co they have are not as much as we have in Nigeria. It is very huge, complex and there are huge demands to cope with in the industry.
“From records, about 12 years ago, we had only 16 AOCs, right now, we have 32, out of which 12 are scheduled operators. We cannot keep operating the way we are operating. Changes have to come in and we have started the process. We are acquiring a regulatory software and in the next one or two weeks, we are going to be ready with the software and training of our staff is going to start on the use of the software. It is a three years program and at the end of the period, we are going to make sure that 80 to 90 percent of NCAA processes are automated and also third party is going to be automated,” he said.
