The executive chairman of the AON, Captain Nogie Meggison, said airlines might be losing over N20 billion yearly to forced cancellations due to poor visibility occasioned by bad weather that could be overcome by the availability of landing aids.
The AON chairman maintained that domestic airlines do not delay or cancel flights because of the weather condition in the country but due to the fact that the navigational aids installed at some airports are not working.
He hinted that in other aviation climes aircraft and people fly at zero visibility, wondering why Nigeria’s case is different. He lamented that in the past two weeks flights have been delayed because of this.
Meggison stated that in some airports night flights are not operated because there are no runway lights while visuals flight had to be either delayed or cancelled because navigational aids are not working.
“There have been skeletal flights for the past two weeks. About 50 per cent of the daily flights have been cancelled because the landing aids are not working and flights cannot operate in low visibility. But in other parts of the world people are flying at zero visibility because they have landing aids at their airports. For three days, Enugu flights were cancelled even at 2,000 meters visibility. There are no landing aids, no navigational equipment in some airports.
“An airline that has not flown for three days has incurred so much loss because you pay the pilots, you refund money to the passengers, you pay your suppliers. Some of the airports do not have runway lights. This is also what is happening to other industries, causing a huge loss of manpower,” he said.
