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Investor seeks safer skies for Africa
- Laments high accident rate
Business mogul and Chairman ANAP Business Jets Limited, Mr. Atedo Peterside has implored aviation regulatory body in Africa to tighten safety requirements to ensure air safety on the continent.
He made the call at the fourth yearly Nigerian Business Aviation conference held in Lagos last weekend.
The banker lamented the high accident rate in the continent.
Peterside stated that the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) safety report 2014 put Africa’s global air traffic at approximately two per cent, regretting that, “our share of global aviation accidents in that same 2014 was ten per cent.”
He said: “Another way to present these statistics is to point out that Africa’s accident rate was 12.9 per million departures, whereas the global average was 2.8 accidents per million departures. There is no excuse for that.”
Peterside stated that Africa can and should be as safety conscious as the rest of the world, adding that there is the need to have safe airports, safe skies and safe aircraft among others.
Besides, he noted that Africa’s accident rate need not be above the world average, stressing that the region’s rate can and should be in line with the world average. The goal he reiterated is achievable in less than a decade because of lack of snowstorms, icy runways amongst several other hazards that exist elsewhere.
Embracing safety as a priority goal he said sounds so simple, yet past Aviation ministers in the region only embraced safety as a priority after their country suffered some horrific air crashes that were clearly avoidable.
“If you ask West Africans to choose between safe skies and national carriers, they will choose skies first. Our Aviation Ministers should constantly ask questions about the surface conditions of all runways, the quality of lighting (runway and taxiways), quality of communications between air traffic control and the pilots they are directing.”
“We want to get to a position where we can say that we should never have an aviation accident anywhere in our region caused by these avoidable factors. Are we there yet? Sadly, we are not there yet, but with a little more application and focus, we could be on our way there”, he added.
He disclosed that many people in the region wrongly equate private jets with safety and regional airlines with high risk. To him, this need not be so , noting that the correlation is not that straight forward.
According to him, “It is the operator and the premium that he places on safety and the good practices that he adopts that makes the difference. A bad operator can therefore run a risky private jet business.”
He said it left Aviation Ministers to ask the hard questions and help initiate and coordinate policies that will get West African aviation to global safety standards, with priority attention to be given to expanding existing airports and equipping them properly with terminals and other facilities to keep pace with growing passenger traffic whilst also building new airports and airstrips to open up the hinterland.
Aviation, he noted is the preferred mode of travel for long distance travel in the future but lamented that sadly, the pursuit of ill-advised and grandiose national carrier projects in the past made people to take their eyes off the safety ball.
He stated that fewer and fewer countries around the world care about a national carrier, saying that successive European and most African countries have given up on the old fashioned national carrier model and jettisoned the idea.
Peterside called on West African countries not to lose energy trying to repeat failed experiments from past years; instead, they should embrace safety as the watchword and the call to action in aviation.
