Nigerian airspace: Are pilots flying blind?

The Nigerian airspace is dotted with communication gaps that threaten safety, but the Nigerian Airspace managers said they are on top of the situations. WOLE SHADARE writes

The bombshell

Not a few saw the legislature’s visit as a ‘ritual’ just to fulfill all righteousness and to make them look as if they are truly working. But this time around, the visit of the Senate committee on Aviation led by Senators Jeremiah Useni, Bala Ibn Na’ Allah and Sbaaba Lafiaji was different, as they spoke the minds of people who saw Nigeria’s airspace as very dangerous in terms of quality of communication facilities.

Most of the navigational facilities are said to be not only obsolete but grossly inadequate and pose serious danger to air travellers. Na’Allah, who is a pilot was visibly angry over poor navaids at most of the airports, saying that the aerodromes have suffered from long period of neglect, poor planning and wanton corruption that has left the sector in a precarious situation.

The senator, who flew in his private aircraft to Lagos, recalled his experience any time he flies within the country’s airspace, adding that he found it very difficult at a point to establish communication with the control tower because of lack of effective radio communication coverage.

Epileptic facilities

He said the aviation sector needed urgent solution, adding that the aviation industry in Nigeria ‘is in trouble’. He wondered why inefficiency is so peculiar with Nigeria, adding that others countries had overcome the challenges that Nigeria is facing many years ago, wondering what the numerous budgetary allocations were used for. The communication facilities across the airport in the country have been declared to be epileptic and dangerous to aviation.

The senators decried the poor state of the controller/pilot VHf communication coverage of the country’s airspace and declared that it constituted a heavy risk since it did not meet required standard. They said that the “horrible facilities” were dangerous to the safety of pilots, aircraft and passengers operating within the Nigerian airspace.

They were piqued that if navigational aids could work in such places as Togo, Ghana and Sao Tome, they wondered why same equipment can’t work in Nigeria.

It was litany of problems for the sector. There seems to be no respite yet for operators and patrons of the Nigerian aviation sector, as more problems have continued to dog the industry.

From tarmac challenges due to poor infrastructure, high cost of aviation fuel to huge expenditure on aircraft acquisition and maintenance, the safety of the country’s airspace is now a subject of controversy between the Senate and the Nigerian Airspace Management Agency (NAMA).

NAMA seeks facility upgrade

The Acting Managing Director of NAMA, Emmanuel Anyasi said the agency had taken delivery of navigational aids including Instrument Landing System (ILS) in four major airports across the country. He said that 65 million Euros Total Radar Coverage of Nigeria system (TRACON) is working well but noted that the equipment designed to aid flight separation is becoming obsolete.

His words, “We will need to need to upgrade the radar. What we have in the radar that is functioning very well is the MOD-S. We need hardware upgrade of the system including software that is outdated. We need the latest version.”

A former Managing Director,  Nnamdi Udoh had while he held sway as NAMA’s Managing Director said Area radar control, an air traffic control service, were available to aeroplanes flying within the Flight Information Region (FIR).

He noted that a considerable number of air traffic controllers were trained to handle the operation at both Kano and Lagos area control centres for flight operations within the nation’s airspace.

To him, the benefits resulting from the area radar control include increased airspace capacity, improved safety, reduced fuel consumption, efficient flow of air traffic, circumnavigation around adverse weather and optimum flight routing.

Other advantages he stated included low carbon dioxide emission and reduced flight time in line with the International Civil Aviation Organisation’s strategic objective of safety, security and environment. The problems the Senate mentioned were not new. The lack of will to provide these services and basic safety procedure is incomprehensible.

Experts, airlines worried

Not least concerned about the country’s airspace are aviation experts and international airlines, as many of them have raised concerns over deteriorating, decaying and poor facilities as these hinder effective communications between air traffic controllers and pilots.

Few years ago, foreign airlines avoid over-flying Nigeria’s airspace because their pilots found it difficult to communicate with air traffic controllers due to poor equipment and facilities in the aviation sector.

The situation is so bad that often times airplanes enter the Nigerian airspace without the knowledge of air traffic controllers. At other times, they only get to know of such flights through telephone calls from their counterparts in Nigeria’s friendly nations. Apparently to avoid running into trouble with the aviation authorities over an open declaration that the country’s airspace was no longer safe for them to overfly, all the major foreign airlines quietly refrained themselves from using the nation’s airspace.

Controllers raise the alarm

Air traffic controllers had continuously warned that the country’s airspace is dotted with moribund communications gadgets (visual and voice) such that air traffic controllers and pilots now have extreme difficulty in reaching one another. Also of greatest concern, is the multi-billion naira total radar coverage of Nigeria, popularly called TRACON. Since the commissioning of the equipment in 2010, it has never really served the purpose it was meant for.

Effective radar to the rescue

The aim of TRACON is to provide total visibility of the Nigerian airspace stretching over 315 nautical miles. When the Nigerian airspace is under full radar coverage, all flights originating, terminating and over-flying the Nigerian airspace, will remain in radio and radar contact with the air traffic controllers every inch of the way.

One expert even described it as the greatest fraud in recent times, stressing that Lagos and Kano are not yet interlinked with the seven other stations.

Components of the radar equipment, which were meant to enhance levels of air safety such as Mode Select Beacon System, Mode S, and Aeronautical Fixed Telecommunication Network (AFTN) as agreed in the contract had not been activated six years after the project was commissioned in Abuja, despite the claims of the management then that every components had been installed.

TRACON was only coined for the project, but its technical name in the sector was terminal radar control. The radar in Lagos had a limitation. A radar is useless without communication.

Conclusion

Many believe that Nigeria has the ability to provide the best airspace safety tools but corruption has prevented the agency to rise above some of the decrepit facilities that dot most of the country’s aerodrome.

Wole Shadare