Why AIB-N is Establishing Aviation Safety Centre

Chinedu Eze

Recently, the Accident Investigation Bureau, Nigeria (AIB-N), held a conference in Abuja to x-ray some accident reports, safety recommendations and implementation and concluded that there should be single accident reporting through one channel so that concerned authorities will have access to the report in order to avoid gaps.
Another major milestone that bureau has set out to do is to establish aviation safety centre to modernise accident investigation reporting and enhance safety in flight operations.

This, the agency said, would also enable airlines and other stakeholders to have easy access to accident reports, which currently is difficult to access because piles and piles of such reports that are stored together in the traditional documentation system.

Commissioner and CEO of AIB-N, Akin Olateru, disclosed that the Bureau before the end of this year, would change the face of serious incident and accident reporting system in Nigeria by improving on the existing Annex 13 of the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO), which deals with Accident Investigation.

The new reporting system would be digital and be web-based that would appear in graphics and in animated style.
Olateru said once completed Nigeria would be the first country in the world to adopt the system and disclosed that the bureau had already signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Saudi Arabia on this, while also collaborating with ICAO.
Olateru said: “AIB-N will very soon be in the world news. We are going the extra miles to come up with different reporting style from the Annex 13, which gives us the right to investigate serious incidents and accidents in the sector.

“We need to move to the 21st century of accident reporting. With the new style we are coming up with, AIB-N will be the first organisation in the world to improve on the Annex 13. We are already discussing with ICAO and we are at the procurement stage at the moment. However, we hope to start the new system before the end of the year.”
He said the major objective of the new system is to enhance safety and to find out what really happened and the causal factor that led to the accident or incident and see how reoccurrence could be prevented.

“Now, the point is that the world standard which is the ICOA has a format of reporting this final reports, which is, you write theses, hundreds of pages of documents. You present it to the world, you put it on your website. And what we are trying to do is to challenge the status quo to actually find a better way of getting this to the public.

“Today, look at it very well, how many people actually read? So, you have this report, 300-page document of what happened, safety recommendation, etc. By the end of the day people don’t read. So what we are trying to do is to digitalise in a graphic way with a database to see how we can report this same text in word. This same word document that we have produced, see how we can put it in a graphic digital format. And that is simply what we are going to be doing very soon. That way, it makes it very simple for the airlines to read. It makes it simple for anybody of interest to go to a particular section rather than flipping through pages of pages of documents,” Olateru explained.
He said the new digital would be made in such a way that one can just zero in on the particular topic or theme that one wants.

“If it is on human factor, you just click on the animation on the graphic. You just click on it, and it tells you everything about human factor. If it is about the engine that interests you, you just click on that point and it gives you everything on that engine. It is about simplifying the way we communicate to the world in terms of our by-product and that has been discussed at the highest level in ICAO, and it has been accepted. By the time we are done, Nigeria will be the first country in the world that will come up with this format. And that is what I mean by Nigeria will lead the world very, very soon in terms of accident investigation reporting system.

Olateru said for institutions to progress and remain relevant they need to invest in research and development.
“You need to have a feedback system to evaluate, re-evaluate, how you do things, check your processes systems and procedures and come up with a better way of doing things or a simplified way of doing things to enhance productivity and that is what we are doing in AIB,” he said.