Bird strikes add to Nigerian airlines troubles

Birds crashing into flying aircraft are adding to the troubles of Nigerian airlines, say experts in the sector.
A bird strike is the sucking in of a bird into an aircraft engine. This instantly damages the engine.
Nogie Meggison, president, Airline Operators of Nigeria, told BusinessDay that even though the incidence of bird strikes that used to occur five to six times monthly had been reduced to a minimum of about two to four times monthly, it is still significant cost burden on airlines.
Some airline operators who spoke with BusinessDay said it cost them $1.5 million to fix an engine affected by bird strike. At an exchange rate of N306 to a dollar, it will cost an airline N459 million to fix one engine after a bird strike, a significant cost burden for most airlines.
Obi Mbanuzuo, accountable manager/chief operating officer, Dana Airlines, told BusinessDay that bird strikes are one of the challenges facing airlines, especially during rainy seasons.
“In Africa, it is warm all the time and there are a lot of vegetation around the airports. If you go to the United States, their airports are concrete. Birds like vegetation, because of this, the airports are supposed to have bird prevention measures to scare off the birds but unfortunately some of our airports do not do that.
“One of our bird strikes was in take-off and the other one was in landing. The damage can take a lot of money to fix,” Mbanuzuo said.
BusinessDay’s checks show that in the past few months, two major bird strike incidents have happened, affecting aircraft engines.
In April, this year, a Dana aircraft, MD 83 with registration number 5N-SRI departed the Murtala Muhammed Airport (MMA), Lagos for Port Harcourt, but had to make an air return to base barely few minutes after departing the airport.
Dana Air spent about $1.5 million (N600m) to replace the damaged engine and return the aircraft to service.
On May 15, 2017, birds hit a Med-View Airline aircraft Boeing 737 with registration number 5N-MAA during take-off from Maiduguri airport.
The aircraft was departing Maiduguri for Lagos via Abuja with more than 100 passengers on-board. The pilot had to immediately make an air return to Maiduguri Airport and disembarked all the passengers who were later told to return to their various homes for another rescheduled flight the following day.
A source in the industry disclosed that in the past 24 months, there had been at least 37 bird strike incidents in the industry, 19 of these occurred on take-off and another 18 on landing. Half of these incidents took place at the Murtala Mohammed Airport, (MMA), Lagos.
A spokesperson for a domestic airline told BusinessDay that bird Strikes happen all the time at Nigerian airports but airlines will rather choose not to announce it to the public so they don’t get scared.
“If you go to the runway in the morning, you will see a lot of birds and the wildlife department in FAAN often chase them away. However, what FAAN should do is to clear the vegetation more frequently. Also, the wildlife department has to apply some chemicals to chase the birds away. In Nigeria, we still do not have these techniques to chase away these birds,” the spokesperson added.
“Bird strikes only show laxity on airport maintenance. The maintenance of the airport is primary. We have trees and vegetation across the airports that attract the birds. The Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN) is supposed to have maintenance periods for each season and during summer, the vegetation is supposed to be cut down,” John Ojikutu, secretary general of the Aviation Round Table, ART and chief executive officer of Centurion Security and Safety Consults told BusinessDay.
Ojikutu said airport maintenance programmes should not only be about the runways, the lights, and the terminals but should also include grass cuttings, vegetation maintenance and deploying bird scaring equipment at the airports to scare the birds away.
An environment conservationist said to reduce birds around the airports, the wild life department need to remove seed-bearing plants to eliminate food sources, use insecticides or pesticides to eliminate food sources for insect-eating birds, cover nearby ponds with netting to prevent birds from landing, remove brush and trees that serve as attractive nesting sites and keep grass mowed short so it is not as suitable for bird shelter.
Segun Omole, Director of Flight Operations, Dana Air, said that despite the huge loss resulting from bird strikes, FAAN with its Department of Wildlife Control have not adopted modern technologies to reduce the threat in any of the nation’s airports.
Omole explained that in order to control the assault on aircraft, the government needed to identify species of birds that create the problems for airlines, those things that attract birds to the airport and acquire modern equipment that would reduce their activities at the nation’s airports.
However, Henrietta Yakubu, FAAN’s acting General Manager responded by saying the Wildlife Unit in FAAN deploys aircraft flight schedule modification, habitat modification and exclusion, repellent and harassment techniques and wildlife removal in a bid to reduce birds around the airport.