By Louis Iba
Pictures of air passengers stressfully disembarking from a Boeing 737 500 series aircraft via an iron ladder mounted on the aircraft and supported by fire service men posted all over the social media some minutes after the inci¬dent occurred might have appeared amusing. But, unmistak¬able also was the depiction of the potential harm to the lives of the passengers.
Death or a permanent disability lurked around that scene should any of the passengers ever lose balance and slip-off the ladder and land on the floor of the airport apron whose surface is designed as hard as any object to support aircraft sometimes the size and weight of a storey building.
Not even Aero Contractors’ excuse of acting under duress would have sufficed. Opting to use a ladder, as Aero excused itself, owing to fears of possible physical assault on the crew by the impatient and angry passengers who were in a haste to keep a wedding deadline in Bauchi would melt in a sec¬ond had one soul been lost. Anything other than a standard air stair manually or electrically powered should not have been deployed to bring down passengers from an aircraft, whose height could be more than that of a storey building, no matter the threat by the passengers.
If the airport failed to provide the motor able air stairs, the pilot of the aircraft had the discretion of returning the flight back to Abuja. That is the rule governing global civil aviation operations, and Aero contractors and its crew on that aircraft fully knew that the law was severely breached. It is a good thing that the Nigerian Civil Aviation Author¬ity (NCAA) had since imposed an undisclosed fine on the airline and also sanctioned the pilot of the aircraft for the breach.
But then, some rare circumstances and it must not be completely ruled out, could compel a father to handover a gun with live bullets to a child. Indeed, anyone so honest and also familiar with the state of the domestic airlines industry in Nigeria will acknowledge how difficult it could be for any domestic airline (like the Aero Contractors case) to refuse to do the bidding of any client who coughed out between N5 million to N15 million to charter a flight. Without a doubt, the industry has degenerated that much that it is no longer impos¬sible for those who regulate safety to go outside the realms of the operator and regulator to include the passengers. About nine air-lines currently ply Nigeria’s domestic routes: Aero Contractors;
These are Arik Air; Med-View; First Nation; Dana Air; Azman Air; Air Peace; Chanchangi and Discovery Air. Few of them can be described as healthy financially. It was in an effort to avoid bankruptcy that the administration of Goodluck Jonathan man¬dated the Asset Management Company of Nigeria (AMCON) to take up some equity and manage some of the airlines.
Four or five years thereafter, with AMCON on ground, the financials of the majority of the airlines are either in the red or heading towards that. It has been widely reported that the situ-ation is that bad that some airlines can no longer meet the pay¬ment of basic staff remunerations and the maintenance of the aircrafts in their fleet.
Staff morale goes down so easily under a condition where basic remuneration is not met by an employer. No one can deny that; neither can anyone also deny how easy it is to get such disenchanted staff to compromise safety and se-curity.
And that is where many feared Aero (with a respectable cul¬ture and safety history) allowed immediate financial benefits rather than the need to stand on the path of safety determine its going to Bauchi that fateful day.
In aviation however, no one – regulator, staff, employer and even the machines – should be given any margin for error. An aircraft up in the sky has no parking space for repairs should anything go wrong.
Sadly, in Nigeria the error margins have been widened by the following factors: paucity of funds caused largely by the apathy by creditor institutions to grant loans to finance new fleet ac-quisitions and routine maintenance abroad, the high premium charged by local underwriting firms, multiple taxation by vari¬ous regulatory agencies and service providers, as well as the exorbitant cost of aviation fuel. Nigeria’s domestic airlines are also going down because of the unfavourable government policy such as the devaluation of the naira, the designation of multiple routes to some foreign airlines to operate in and out of more than one airport and the absence of any aircraft maintenance facility in the country.
For instance, three foreign airlines: Ethiopian Airlines, Ke¬nyan Airways, Air France, and Emirates are all carrying out commercial flight operations out of more than one airport in Nigeria. Ethiopian Airlines flies into the Lagos, Abuja, Kano, and Enugu international airports.
This trend negates globally known best practices which seek to protect the local industry by allowing foreign carri¬ers utilize just one major international route into a country, while the domestic airlines are given the chance of feeding the foreign airlines with passengers from the other airports within the country. Nigerian airlines are in such a bad shape that they now owe regulators and service providers about N6billion.
In his maiden press briefing, Amaechi while tactfully avoiding giving the government of President Jonathan kudos, had lauded the judicious deployment of funds by the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria, Nigerian Airspace Manage¬ment Agency, and Nigerian Meteorological Agency into boosting airport infrastructure.
But committing huge public or private sector fund into good airports and navigational equipment without functional or viable domestic airlines, amounts to a sheer futile venture for airports are for airlines as water is for fish.
And that is where the minister of transport should take the Aero Contractor saga more seriously by devoting less time to studying the airport, and rather commencing real hard work, which must include an honest engagement with domestic air¬line operators, bureaucrats who formulate the policies for the industry, creditors, underwriters, and fuel suppliers on how best to resolve the many problems marring the local airline industry.
Until the Buhari government puts in place lofty policies that would boost local airlines fortunes, the sector’s potentials to contribute to the growth of the larger Nigerian economy would always remain unlocked.
Iba wrote from Lagos
