The state of infrastructure at the Murtala Muhammed International Airport, (MMIA) Lagos, Nigeria’s busiest airport, has continued to slow down passenger growth and movement.
BusinessDay’s checks show that infrastructure, which can help ease passenger movement and growth at the airport, is either absent or not adequate enough to meet demand.
Some of the infrastructure includes inadequate checking-in counters; inadequate passengers screening checkpoints and screening machines or unserviceable screening machines resulting in manual screening; inadequate aircraft boarding gates; inadequate aircraft parking areas; inadequate ground handling equipment or facilities, and absence of taxiways or sufficient links from aprons to runways.
Two weeks ago, a Qatar Airways Boeing 787 filled with holidaymakers and school children returning to Nigeria was unable to find a parking spot at MMIA after a nine-hour trip from Doha, Qatar.
Airport officials claimed the airport was congested but experts said the situation spoke of the rot that had been the lot of Nigeria’s busiest international airport, and deflated talks of becoming a regional air hub.
Ado Sanusi, the CEO of Aero Contractors, explains that Nigeria has flying public and can still cultivate more and grow passenger traffic to 10 million per annum if it has the right infrastructure.
“We must also make sure we have the infrastructure so that when people enter the airport they will be happy with what they see. We must also have the confidence of the flying public so that they will feel comfortable flying our airlines. With all these in place, the introduction of new airplanes will definitely allow growth in the market,” Sanusi states.
Further checks show that many of the airports in Nigeria do not have runway lights and navigational landing aids, meaning such airports are only open between 7am and 6pm daily.
“Airlines can’t fully utilise their airplanes for 24-hour operations. No airplane or factory machine can be profitable only from 7am to 6pm daylight operations,” Nogie Meggison, chairman, Airline Operators of Nigeria (AON), says.
Meggison therefore calls for the provision of airfield lighting and navigational landing aids at all airports in Nigeria to reduce delays and cancellations and allow for a 24-hour operation and better utilisation of airplanes.
According to the latest record released by the Consumer Protection Department of the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA), domestic airlines operating in Nigeria recorded 7,926 cases of delayed flights in the first quarter of last year (between January and March 2019) alone. This represents more than 50 percent of the flights within the period under review.
These data confirm that flights hardly take off at scheduled time in Nigeria, and more worrisome is that all the aforementioned airlines operated an average number of four aircraft or less during this period, except Air Peace, which operated about 18 aircraft on domestic routes and recorded about 90 flights a day.
In Nigeria, passengers spend unduly long time at security screening points because of insufficient number of X-ray machines. Therefore, passengers are forced to queue at security screening points, especially at peak hours.
In other climes, it takes between 30 seconds and two minutes to get screened, but in Nigerian airports it takes between five and 15 minutes to get screened, depending on the number of passengers waiting to be checked.
For example, Air Peace and Arik Air face a lot of delay processing passengers at the General Aviation Terminal (GAT) of the Murtala Muhammed International Airport, Lagos, because there is only one functional X-ray machine at any point in time, and hundreds of passengers going to different destinations during the morning rush hours must pass through one functional X-ray machine at each of the terminals at the GAT.
John Ojikutu, member of aviation industry think tank group, Aviation Round Table (ART) and chief executive of Centurion Securities, lists infrastructure gaps at the airport to include inadequate skilled manpower to man most of these facilities, as system can cause delays, especially the passengers screening checkpoints where the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) recommended standard is at least five, but nearly all Nigerian airports have two or three persons.
Other factors, he mentions, include, “Airspace management; inadequate and inexperience air traffic controllers, particularly for aerodromes, and approach control can cause delays if the traffic volume is beyond the capacity and capability of the controllers, especially if there is no supervisors that can always intervene; inadequate and inefficient landing aids, poor communication both at terminal and en route, and poor weather at destinations, en route and at alternative airports.”
IFEOMA OKEKE
