The poor patronage of Nigerian airlines is largely as a result of the low level of confidence in the local airline operators, experts have said.
They noted that as a result, the airline operators had yet to have huge market share of the regional, continental and international routes.
According to the experts, for a country of over 150 million people, the traffic figure of less than nine million passengers for local flight annually represents an abysmal loss and clearly shows the apathy Nigerians have for air travel.
They added that the high level of poverty, occasioned by the huge cost of air travel, made people to prefer road travel to air travel.
Speaking at the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport with the theme, ‘Airport Remodelling in Nigeria, Challenges and Prospect of Aerotropolis’, a top official of Lufthansa German Airlines, Mr. Adewale Sanni, stated that the situation remained worrisome.
He noted that Nigeria got a respite from 2006 until last year when Dana Air crashed in Lagos, killing all the passengers onboard, adding that the accident went into history as the worst in Nigeria.
Sanni said during the dark period, many wealthy Nigerians going to Abuja or Port Harcourt chose to fly international airlines first to Europe before connecting to their original destinations.