Aviation industry regulator-Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority- has urged the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria to make available land for domestic airlines to construct aircraft maintenance hangar.
The Director-General, NCAA, Dr. Harold Demuren, said there was need to encourage airline operators willing to build hangars, adding that the presence of such facility in the country would help to reduce the cost of operations among other benefits.
He urged government to make it a deliberate policy to promote hangar development and give airlines a lot of incentives, describing the facility as very important for aviation safety.
He described as ridiculous a situation where huge amount was requested before land could be given to operators willing to build safety critical facilities such as maintenance hangar.
According to him, the presence of several maintenance hangars in some foreign countries was made possible through the assistance of the governments of those countries.
He said, “In America, they give land free for you to build maintenance hangar. This is because it promotes safety. The airline should be given land because that is what it is meant for. And not when you want to give them land, you give them small land that they cannot expand. I am saying this because for the future of Nigeria that is where we should go.”
Currently, only Aero Nigeria Airlines and Arik Air have their own hangars for rudimentary A and B checks.
Others airlines make use of the Nigerian Air Force hangar for their minor maintenance repairs.
However, Aero currently possesses the capacity to carry out extensive C and D checks on its Q400 turbo-prop aircraft and helicopters locally.
Meanwhile, Demuren said the new equipment called Automated Flight Information Reporting System would put end to speculations on actual causes of air accidents and incidents in the country.
Already, the NCAA and airline operators have embraced the new system.
AFIRS is a new revolutionary technology that combines on-board logic and processing on the aircraft with ground-based servers that interpret and route messages from the aircraft to parties on the ground such as the airline, operation centres and regulators.
When an event is detected and triggered, not only is an alert sent from the aircraft to interested parties, but the facility also starts to stream the Flight Data Recorder (black box) off the aircraft in real-time to ground-based servers.
