Part 1: Apologies for the Delay, Rethinking Culture of Late, Postponed, Cancelled Flights in Nigeria

A peculiar occurrence in Nigerian aviation has become so commonplace it barely provokes outrage. Passengers arrive at the airport on time, check in, pass through security, and settle into the departure area. Then the announcement comes: the flight has been delayed. Then the announcement: “Apologies for the delay…”

The delay can be short or long, with departure times shifting multiple times. Passengers often stop asking when the aircraft will depart and instead wonder whether it will depart at all. Sometimes flights are rescheduled to another day or time, and occasionally they are cancelled entirely.

What is perhaps more troubling than the delay itself is the effect of prolonged exposure to this experience on travellers: people are becoming desensitised to the abnormal.

Passengers now commonly build uncertainty into their travel plans. They are advised to take the first flight, opt for the last, and perhaps arrive a day early. It’s recommended to avoid scheduling important activities near arrival and to allow extra hours for delays. Never rely completely on the stated arrival time. While these may be practical survival tactics, they are not genuine solutions.

A society should be careful when its citizens become so accustomed to institutional failure that they start designing their lives around it.

Interestingly, no airline sets out with the stated objective of delaying, postponing or cancelling flights. No pilot wants to arrive late. No airport operator wants passengers to sit indefinitely in departure lounges. No airline manager begins the working day hoping to disappoint hundreds of customers. Intentions, however, are not enough. In aviation, as in every serious industry, facts and consequences matter more than intentions.

If an airline repeatedly schedules flights that depart substantially later than advertised, the relevant question is not simply whether the airline intended to be late. The question is whether the system delivers what it promised. This distinction is important because lateness is not merely an inconvenience.

A delayed flight may cause you to miss a business meeting, a connection, an exam, a medical appointment, a court appearance, a family event, or an opportunity. It could also lead to extra hotel charges, transport expenses, meal costs, rearranged schedules, lost work hours, and wasted time.

For businesses, the implications can be even greater. A delayed executive may miss an investor meeting. A delayed technical team may postpone a project. A delayed shipment may disrupt the supply chain. A cancelled trip may affect contracts, events and commercial commitments.

There is also an emotional cost that should not be underestimated: frustration, anxiety, uncertainty, and the peculiar helplessness of not knowing what happens next.

There is also a reputational cost. An aviation system is part of a country’s image. The experience of arriving in a country, moving through its airports and travelling between its cities communicates something about that country’s organisation, reliability and capacity.

Delays and cancellations can arise from aircraft technical issues and unscheduled maintenance; weather; crew availability and scheduling; airport congestion; air traffic management; runway or navigational constraints; turnaround times; fuelling and ground handling; passenger processing; security procedures; operational disruptions; inadequate scheduling buffers; equipment availability; and, in some circumstances, decisions made to protect safety. Some problems originate with airlines. Some originate at airports. Some involve air traffic management. Some are external. Some are combinations of several factors.

It is important to be clear about the source and not to blame, because diagnosis precedes treatment. If every delay is simply described as “operational reasons”, the industry loses an important opportunity to learn. “Operational reasons” can become a convenient umbrella under which very different problems disappear.

A serious aviation system needs to know not only that a flight was late, but why it was late, how often that cause occurs, who controls it, how much time it costs, and what is being done to prevent recurrence. That is where the intellectual challenge begins.

One concept deserves attention here: opportunity blindness.

Opportunity blindness is the failure to recognise a problem not only as a problem but also as an opportunity for improvement, innovation and competitive advantage. When an industry becomes accustomed to a recurring problem, it can lose sight of it. The problem becomes part of the landscape. That is very dangerous.

Repeated flight delays should not be seen only as something passengers must endure. It should be seen as a vast organisational challenge that offers opportunities for better scheduling, maintenance planning, crew management, airport coordination, data use, customer service, technology and management.

A persistent problem is often a market waiting for a solution. The entrepreneur sees a market. The engineer sees a design challenge. The scientist sees a phenomenon to explain. The manager sees a process to improve. The statesman sees an institutional problem to solve. The danger arises when everyone simply sees “the way things are”.

An argument often made in response to Nigeria’s aviation uncertainty is that travellers should simply adapt. That advice sounds practical. In reality, it can become intellectually dangerous. Homo sapiens does not merely adapt.

Human progress has never been built entirely on adapting to imperfection. Human beings encounter heat and invent cooling systems. They encounter rivers and build bridges. They encounter congested roads and develop traffic management systems. They encounter darkness and develop electricity. They encounter distance and develop aircraft. Even at the most elementary level, human beings organise movement by creating routes, schedules, signals and rules, including the one-way system.

The distinguishing characteristic of homo sapiens is not merely the capacity to endure conditions. It is the capacity to observe, imagine, organise, invent and improve.

Therefore, something is fundamentally wrong with a culture that tells travellers: take the first flight because later flights may be unreliable; go the day before; or do not book anything important around your flight. These are reasonable precautions for an individual. But when they become permanent institutional advice, they amount to surrender. They imply that the individual must continually adapt to an organisation’s inability to deliver predictable outcomes. That cannot be the final answer.

The challenge is not to demand that every flight operate without disruption. Aviation is a complex safety-critical system, and some disruptions are unavoidable. The objective should be reliability, not fantasy.

A mature aviation industry should distinguish between unavoidable disruption and preventable disruption and relentlessly reduce the latter.

Several things can help.

We need to measure punctuality relentlessly. Every airline should treat on-time performance as a serious operational KPI, not merely a statistic for regulators. What gets measured gets managed.

Part 2 to continue next week Sunday

*Anthony Kila, the author of “Strategy Systems and Power in Flight: Lessons in Strategy, Leadership and Institution Building from Aviation”, is a Jean Monnet Professor of Strategy and Development at the Commonwealth Institute of Advanced and Professional Studies (CIAPS). He also serves as Pro-Chancellor and Chairman of the Governing Council of the Michael and Cecilia Ibru University (MCIU). He is the founding Chairman of Sabre Africa Travel Network.

Wole Shadare