As Yuletide Draws Nigh, Experts Trace Cause of Flight Delays, Cancellations to Low Capacity

Chinedu Eze

Aviation experts have traced the cause of flight delays and cancelation besides weather and VIP movement to inadequate aircraft, which leads to hiccups caused by overutilisation of equipment.

The development, they stressed, would become more acute as Yuletide season approaches when travellers demand the highest number of seats in domestic air travel every year.
The Managing Director of Flight Logistics Solutions, Amos Akpan, explained that what causes delays is overscheduling without enough ground time for turn around, which he said is caused by ignorance and poor management.

Akpan said there should be schedule reliability, taking into consideration the factors of environment and earmark enough time for turn around.
He noted that when these realties are not observed, the airline would not be able to keep to its schedule.

“For example, if an operating aircraft is scheduled to fly to Port Harcourt, from Port Harcourt to Abuja and from Abuja to Asaba, the operations manager must allocate enough time for turnaround time. If an aircraft is scheduled to operate from Lagos to Abuja, leaves Lagos by 9:30 and it would fly for 55 minutes and the turn around time is 30 minutes, it might take more than 55 minutes if there is weather issue or VIP movement, by the time it would land it has already spent about one hour, 10 minutes and on landing disembarking and boarding can take a longer time after the 30 minutes scheduled for ground turn around has been eroded.

“This means that if the airline scheduled that the aircraft would operate the next flight by 11:00 it would be late by at least 45 minutes to one hour and if the weather or VIP movement that delayed the aircraft was longer, it may even delay the next flight by two hours, “he explained.

The experts said that airlines over schedule their fleet when there is not enough equipment and they would want to service their routes.
Akpan noted that if the airlines do not plan very well they would find it difficult to keep to their schedule.

“Airlines have environmental and managerial factors to contend with and these include bad weather, VIP movement because in Nigeria we don’t have blue corridor, which enables commercial airlines to fly even when there is VIP movement. In VIP movement they don’t tell you when it will end for security reasons. Also our airports do not have fuel hydrants at the airside, fuel bowsers have to come to fuel the aircraft. If this is not planned well it can cause delays. A flight should be given at least one hour to one and half hours ground time. Then an airline should schedule all its daylight airports first to make sure that they don’t operate towards dusk because if there were delays the airline would be forced to cancel the flights,” he said.

Akpan further suggest that airlines should review regularly what they send out to the public to reflect the real situation on ground, disclosing that maintenance must always update operations and logistics department on the aircraft that are airworthy so that they would be scheduled for operation.

“Operations and logistics would now notify ticketing and stations that the aircraft, example, 5NXYZ would not be in service today. But if it would be in service, maintenance would indicate when it would be in service and give enough time so that the schedule that would be done would not lead to delays.

“Maintenance department must tell the operations and logistics when it will release the aircraft for flights and it must be fuelled before handling it over to operations. There should be a synergy between maintenance, operations, customer, ticketing and stations. Operations are seen as customer to maintenance and customer service is customer to operations. They are known as internal and external customers. The external customers are the passengers, which must be satisfied by the airline,” Akpan said.
Since the resumption of flights last year, domestic airlines have been facing the problem of under capacity, which has given rise to flight delays and sometimes flight cancellation, especially on daylight airports.

To solve this problem, airlines have embarked on leasing aircraft to at least meet the demand of the Yuletide season.
In the last four months Nigerian carriers have leased aircraft from lessors and other airlines whose fleet are not in service due to shrinking market occasioned by the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Recently the Managing Director of Aero Contractors, Captain Mahmoud Abdullahi told THISDAY that aircraft leasing is good for Nigerian carriers because they do not have capacity and that explained why there have been issues of flight delays, flight cancellation and high cost of flights.
“Nigerian airlines don’t have capacity, there are passengers, if you go to the airport as of today, you could see passengers begging for tickets. So all you are looking for is for capacity, just get the right aircraft, put it on the right route and passengers will fly. We could see the passengers’ number growing and the high season is coming, we don’t want Nigerians to go through what they have been going through in previous years most especially in November and December, ”Abdullahi said.