Part 2: Apologies for the Delay, Rethinking Culture of Late, Postponed, Cancelled Flights in Nigeria

Continued from last week

We need to diagnose the causes. Delays should be categorised properly. We should be able to identify technical, crew, airport, weather, ATC, turnaround, passenger-processing, and other causes. Repeated causes should trigger management attention.

We need to fix the schedule. A timetable is a promise. Airlines should not base schedules on theoretical aircraft utilisation while ignoring realistic turnaround times, crew requirements, airport congestion, and operational contingencies. An attractive schedule that cannot be reliably delivered is a bad marketing document, not a service.

We improve coordination. An aircraft does not operate in isolation. Airlines, airports, ground handlers, air traffic managers, security agencies, regulators and passengers are parts of one ecosystem. A failure at one point can cause delays across the network.

We need to use technology intelligently. Predictive maintenance, real-time operational dashboards, automated passenger communications, data analytics and artificial intelligence can help identify emerging disruptions and improve decision-making. However, technology is not a substitute for management. Technology can reveal a problem; leadership must decide what to do.

We need to communicate honestly. A passenger can often tolerate bad news better than uncertainty. If a flight is delayed, passengers deserve timely, accurate information. If the cause is known, explain it. If the estimated departure time changes, the communication should reflect that change. Silence is not customer service.

We need to build a culture of recovery. When disruption occurs, the question should not end with: What went wrong? It should continue to: How quickly can we recover? How do we minimise the consequences? What have we learnt? How do we prevent recurrence? That is the difference between incident management and organisational learning.

We need to make reliability a competitive advantage. Airlines often compete on price, routes, aircraft type, loyalty programmes and perceived comfort. Another powerful proposition: we leave when we say we will. That way, reliability can become a brand. An airline that consistently demonstrates operational discipline does not merely transport passengers. It sells something increasingly valuable: certainty.

Regulators also have a role. Regulation should not merely respond to catastrophic failures. It should encourage continuous improvement in operational reliability, consumer protection and transparency. Passengers should have access to meaningful information about airline performance. The industry should have credible benchmarks. Persistent and unexplained patterns should attract scrutiny. But regulation alone cannot solve this.

An airline cannot regulate itself into excellence through compliance. Airlines need an internal culture in which executives, operations managers, engineers, pilots, cabin crew, and ground personnel understand that time is part of the product.

A flight is not merely an aircraft moving from Point A to Point B. It is a promise about when that movement will take place. Perhaps the deepest issue is that the aviation industry, and society more broadly, needs to reconsider time’s economic value.

When hundreds of passengers spend two or three unnecessary hours waiting, the loss is more than mere personal irritation. Multiply those hours by thousands of passengers, hundreds of flights, and many days, and the scale becomes significant. We need to remember that time is labour, time is productivity, time is family, time is commerce, time is opportunity, time is life.

An economy that routinely wastes its citizens’ time imposes a hidden cost on itself. This is why the question of flight reliability deserves to move beyond social media complaints and frustrated conversations in airport lounges. It deserves to become an intellectual, managerial, technological and policy challenge.

The first step is admitting that it is not normal. The most important step may also be the simplest. We must stop treating recurrent flight delays, postponements and cancellations as normal. Not every delay is a failure. Not every cancellation is incompetence. Safety must always come first, and genuine operational emergencies will occur. But a pattern of avoidable unreliability is a blemish. And a blemish should be cleaned.

A pattern of unavoidable delay is a sore, and a sore should be treated. A weakness should be strengthened. A recurring problem should be studied. A system that is not working as well as it should must be redesigned until it works better. We need intention, vision and discipline.

The aviation industry should therefore take up the challenge not merely to explain why flights are late, but to reduce the incidence of lateness; not merely to apologise for cancellations, but to learn from them; not merely to advise passengers to adapt, but to improve the system they are being asked to adapt to.

Nigeria has intelligent aviation professionals, experienced operators, capable engineers, sophisticated technology, regulators, academics and entrepreneurs. The resources for improvement exist. What is required is to bring them together around a clear proposition:

Unreliable flight schedules are not a permanent feature of Nigerian aviation. They are a problem to be solved. The first victory will come when passengers no longer have to ask whether their flight will depart on time. The greater victory will come when airlines regard punctuality not as an aspiration but as a discipline.

And perhaps the most important victory will be intellectual: when the industry stops seeing recurrent disruption as an unavoidable fact of Nigerian life and starts seeing it for what it really is: a challenge, a blemish, a sore and an opportunity.

If we can list the problems, we can find the solutions. The task now is to look at the problem long enough, clearly enough and seriously enough to solve it.

*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