NAMA assures Senate over safety of air travellers

MANAGING Director and Chief Executive of the Nigerian Airspace Management Agency, Mr. Ibrahim Abdulsalam, yesterday told the Senate that there are adequate safety arrangements put in place for air passengers.

The NAMA boss gave this assurance when he appeared before the senate ad-hoc committee on Aviation to explain efforts being made by his agency to make the nation’s aviation sector more viable and safe for travellers.

Despite the recent rating of the nation’s airports as being among the worst in the world, he said his agency had acquired a central radar system stationed in Lagos and Kano to monitor aircrafts in the nation’s airspace.

He noted that from the Lagos Radar Centre, the operators could view what is happening at the Kano Centre and vice versa, adding that the radar was of two ways, one civil and another military but clarified that it was not as if the military would use its own alone.

The NAMA boss said, “For now, the whole of Nigeria airspace is covered but the aircrafts operators had to cooperate with us.

Abdulsalam also said that calibration, an aviation device that enables the aircraft to land safely, had been outsourced because Nigeria abandoned its aircraft that was configured for calibration for over 20 years, which had become unserviceable.

He said, “We used to have the facility for calibration but the aircraft was left unserviceable for 20 years,” noting that though his agency needed to calibrate, there is no local company to calibrate, hence it had to go outside the country.