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NIGERIANS have responded to the recent Bellview Airline disaster at Lisa village, Ogun State, not only with anguish but also with palpable anger, particularly at the deplorable state of the aviation industry in the country.
NIGERIANS have responded to the recent Bellview Airline disaster at Lisa village, Ogun State, not only with anguish but also with palpable anger, particularly at the deplorable state of the aviation industry in the country. Their anger is understandable for barely a week after all the 117 passengers and crew on board, Bellview flight 210 were killed, an Associated Airline 36-seater turboprop Short 360 plane with 20 passengers and crew from Benin skidded off a flooded runway when it touched down at the Murtala Mohammed Airport in Lagos. The plane's nose-wheel broke while it was taxing on the runway, although, fortunately, no life was lost.
Before the Bellview disaster there had been a number of near misses across the country, the most notorious of which was the incident in July 2005 when an Air France A330 aircraft from Paris hit a herd of cows while trying to land at the Port Harcourt International Airport. The cows had strayed onto the runway because the airport has no perimeter fencing. On June 11, 2005 a Boeing 737 aircraft belonging to EAS Airlines had skidded off the runway of the Yakubu Gowon Airport in Jos. The very next day a Chachangi Airline B727-200 aircraft also skidded off the runway in Lagos. A few days later a Tristar cargo plane belonging to Almiron Aviation of Uganda crash-landed at the Lagos airport and on July 23 a Lufthansa airplane also ran into a ditch at the same airport runway.
All the incidents in Lagos took place on the 18L runway which has been forced to serve both international and domestic flights since the closure, over a year ago, of the second runway (18R) at the airport. The enormous pressure on 18L has led to severe wear and tear, which has in turn posed serious danger to landing aircraft. Its constant closure for emergency repairs has led to airplane downtime, a loss of revenue for airlines and frustration for passengers. In the circumstances it is not surprising that the Nigerian aviation industry has been described in the international media, rightly or wrongly, as one of the worst in the world.
As was the case with the Bellview accident there were conflicting and often contradictory accounts of the Associated Airline incident between the Ministry of Aviation and some of its parastatals, particularly, the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority. In the case of the Bellview disaster the Minister had in fact been sent on a fool's errand to Kishi, Oyo State, hundreds of kilometres from the actual scene of the accident, which was barely 50 kilometres from the plane's departure point in Lagos.
There have also been conflicting reports between the Inspector General of Police and senior officials of other stakeholder agencies - Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN), the Nigerian Airspace Management Agency (NAMA), the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA), and the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) - on whether the Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) and the Flight Data Recorder, otherwise called the Black box, have indeed been recovered. This has cast a shadow on the investigations.
It also appears that Bellview itself has more explaining to do. Certainly Nigerians would want the airline to respond to the claims made by Col. Nick Luck, a Briton, who was a passenger on a Bellview flight from Freetown, Sierra Leone, to Banjul, The Gambia. Col Luck claims that there had been an engine explosion during the flight and that it was the same aircraft that crashed a few hours later in Lisa. He also claims that he had reported the incident to airline officials and asked them to get their engineers to examine the aircraft but had literally been given the cold shoulder. These are grave accusations bordering on the issue of negligence on the part of the airline. It should form part of the investigation of the Bellview disaster, which we hope will be very thoroughly and professionally done, and upon conclusion the report will be made public as a means to reassure anxious relatives of the victims and the generality of Nigerians.
Taken together, the catalogue of disasters and near misses; the disconnect between the Ministry of Aviation and its parastatals; the disgracefully incompetent and painfully slow response to the Bellview disaster; all these point to an airline industry in a terrible state of disarray. That it would require a Presidential directive imposing a date for completing the repairs on the only functional runway at the Lagos airport, the major gateway for international passengers and the hub of domestic aviation, demonstrates quite vividly the level of incompetence in the management of the aviation industry in the country.
It appears that the systemic collapse which the nation has witnessed in such sectors as education, health and industry has been replicated in the aviation industry. Critical infrastructure is in a terrible state of disrepair; agencies charged with oversight responsibilities have failed both the government and the people in their inability to perform their functions. In the event, foreign airlines operating in the country have had cause since the Bellview disaster to boycott the Lagos route a couple of times, refusing to allow their planes to use the Lagos airport runway for safety reasons. This has caused enormous hardship to intending passengers, apart from the fact that both the airlines and the stakeholder agencies lose enormous revenue when the airport idles away.
Whereas the airline industry is capital intensive, virtually all the local operators are severely undercapitalised. Most use planes which are very old. According to the NCAA, 54 per cent of the passenger aircraft on domestic routes are over 22 years old. The plane involved in the Bellview Airline disaster is said to be 24 years old, and has reportedly aborted take-offs twice this year, once when one of its engines caught fire. The domestic wing of the Lagos airport operates like a typical bus garage in downtown Lagos. While airlines the world over are moving to e-ticketing, touts sell and transfer tickets at the domestic wing of the Lagos airport, and they do it in such a disorganised and uncoordinated fashion that names on the passenger manifest do not in fact match the actual people on board.
There is little doubt that the aviation industry in Nigeria is in a terrible state of neglect; it requires very urgently a major overhaul, in terms of consolidation and capitalisation, professionalisation of management, provision of state of the art equipment and infrastructure. The capital base of airlines should be high enough to enable operators compete favourably with the foreign airlines. Government should encourage mergers and consolidation in the industry and all operators unable to meet the capital base benchmark, as is happening in the banking industry, should lose their operating licences.
Government should professionalise the staff of the agencies with oversight responsibilities and stop using them as instruments of political patronage. It should also ensure that infrastructure in the industry meet global standards. In fact the Nigerian aviation industry should be measured against the International Air Transport Association (IATA) benchmark. All airlines operating in the country should be made to undergo the IATA safety audit process.
Ensuring the safety and security of the Nigerian people is the first priority of government and this should not be compromised in any sector, least of all in the aviation industry. Nigerians deserve an aviation industry that will compete with the best in the world. The nation can no longer afford to lose its citizens through the incompetence and criminal negligence of those charged with the responsibility of ensuring that Nigerians patronise a safe and secure aviation industry.