The Acting Managing Director of the Nigerian Airspace Management Agency (NAMA), Matthew Lawrence Pwajok has urged pilots, air traffic controllers, airlines, ground handlers, passengers and other stakeholders in the aviation industry to promptly report incidents to the authorities as this would further enhance the relative safety in the industry and boost confidence in air travel.
Pwajok who was an award recipient at the Association of Foreign Airlines and Representatives in Nigeria (AFARN) safety summit and awards which held in Lagos recently contended that investing in sensitization of key stakeholders in the area of safety reporting is very important.
According to him, incident reports were a critical and strategic aspect of the aviation safety chain, because “if you don’t report incidents we can’t control them, if we don’t have reports we cannot provide the required risk analysis and mitigation.”
He commended pilots “for being very faithful in incident reporting, even to the detriment of the airlines, as this could sometimes cause slight flight delays while awaiting a review or investigation of the incident by NCAA before releasing the aircraft back for operations.
The NAMA MD opined that the relative safety enjoyed in the sector over the last 10 years was not by chance or luck but as a result of significant investments both in infrastructural deployment and human capital development to enhance safety in the Nigerian airspace.
“One of the first things the agency did under the Obasanjo government was the implementation of Safe Tower project and this began with the automation of the control tower at Abuja airport in 2007. In 2008 we completed that of Lagos and Port Harcourt and subsequently Kano.
“This project provided the main mitigation to what was considered the primary cause of most of these air disasters. The project provided NAMA with automated air traffic management systems, as well as meteorological sensors along the runways and provided ATC with real time weather information from the runways.
“We went further to deploy the Total Radar Coverage of Nigeria (TRACON) in 2010. We could now track aircraft over the entire airspace of Nigeria and beyond, unlike before when air traffic controllers had to manually depend on pilot reports to control and ensure safety of flights, separation of aircraft from each other, sequencing them for arrival or for takeoff. “
Pwajok further stated that the drive towards enhancing air safety is attributable to global, regional and national initiatives following the development of the ICAO Global Air Navigation Plan, Global Aviation Safety Plan and the Global Aviation Safety Plan in 2012.
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