Why safety recommendations should be implemented, by Olateru

Aircraft engineer, Akin Olateru, is Commissioner, Accident Investigation Bureau (AIB). In this interview with WOLE SHADARE, he speaks on the expansion of AIB’s brief to probe rail, road and marine accidents, capacity and air safety. Excerpts

This agency, the Accident Investigation Bureau (AIB), has done so well in terms of accident reports, with timely release of accident reports, unlike what obtained in the past where reports remain on the shelf long after accidents have been investigated?

Since 2017, AIB has released 58 per cent of the total number of releases done since the creation of AIB in 2007. In term of final reports, we have done 58 per cent. The main reason AIB is set up is to investigate accidents and serious incidents and to come up with safety recommendations to prevent future occurrence. If you don’t release those reports in time, you are doing a disservice to the entire industry because there won’t be lessons learnt. How do you prevent the reoccurrence? By the time you are issuing your safety recommendations – may be four or five years – the airline may not even be in operation any more. When I assumed office, I said no report will go beyond 18 months, except in an extremely special case, which we have not had. We are like the back-end of the operations, unlike NCAA that is visible. We influence safety through the backend. Our work is extremely important because we are the only institution that can investigate Nigeria Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) to see where there are lapses or gaps and to proffer safety recommendations to NCAA on how to do things better.

What have you done to motivate workers to achieve the results so far?

Whatever you think, whatever you feel, all the actions you take in life are majorly influenced by two things – firstly, your beliefs and secondly your values. These two components, in a way, shape our decisions and, in turn, eventually shape our lives. That is life. When I came in in January 2017, AIB was at its lowest ebb. I inherited a disgruntled staff, a poorly funded agency. An agency of government you can say, on mandate in terms of performance, scoring below 35 per cent. Today, I stand tall before you to let you know parts of our achievements since we came into government. I said earlier that there are two major components that shape our lives, that are your values and your beliefs and they influence your decisions in a great deal and they influence everything we do. When I came in, our beliefs and values we had to work on them. On the human elements or human capital, we had a lot to do on that and we did a lot on that and part of the improvements we made in our human capital was training and retraining, changing the mind-set of our investigators. We moved away from our individualistic way of doing things to a group way of doing things, training them to know the effect of good team work. These are some of the key things we concentrated on. In doing that, we needed the assistance and support of great institutions around the world. It makes sense to learn from the best and we approached some nations, institutions at that time. I stand today to tell you the U.S. government has been our greatest ally and greatest supporters through the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). They have been in reality and major pillar of support. They have supported us with everything humanly possible through the Managing Director then, Dennis Jones, who had been to Nigeria on several times to train our investigators with his team. The U.S. government, through the Safe Skies programme, supported us immensely. We have other nations who didn’t believe in us. I really sincerely want to thank the U.S. government, especially the NTSB and most especially Mr. Dennis Jones, who is a gift to the world. He has been a major pillar of support. Without them, maybe we won’t be where we are today.

What ground work have you done on the multi-modal system you are proposing?

Going multi-modal means we are going to be investigating not just air accidents, we are going to be investigating rail accidents, we are going to be investigating marine accidents and road accidents. We are joining nations round the world who operate this multi-modal system. Last year, the Federal Executive Council approved our proposal, the new draft bill for AIB, before the Senate went on recess. This Bill is in the Senate and hopefully, before the end of this year, the bill will be passed and that would make Nigeria one of the top nations that does multi-modal. Just two months ago, we reviewed that to take care of all those gaps. How do we prevent future occurrence? When I said training, in the last one year we have sent 30 of our investigators to Cranfield University to train on multi-modal accident investigation. They are back in Nigeria. We are working closely with the U.S. NTSB. Singapore NTSB is working with us on this. As we speak, we have a relationship with NTSB as some of our investigators go there for on-the-job training, not just read books or sit in the classroom, but to actually be physically present with the U.S. investigators to support us on that. Another thing you have to understand is that we will take on some rail staff from Nigeria Railways the same with maritime and same with road and train them how to investigate accidents properly. Those are the programmes we have in place to ensure we get there. It is not going to happen overnight. It takes time to build institutions. I can confidently say to you that AIB is a world-class institution.

You spoke eloquently about the different MOUs AIB has with some countries. Could you specifically tell us in details what these MOUs tend to achieve? Secondly, on the inter-modal system, it is obviously going to be a wide scope for AIB, it requires a lot of trainings, do you really have the capacity to train these different groups?

I will start with the MOU. I will give you an example of Sao Tome and Principe. The last accident, which occurred in Sao Tome, was ceded to Nigeria to investigate. We investigated that accident and final report was released 12 months after the accident. That gave my investigators some kind of exposure. You need to understand what accident investigation is all about. There are no two accidents that are the same. They may look alike, but if you look critically, you will see that there are some other things you need to learn as you go along. That is one thing strengthening your technical competence. Take France for instance, France wants Nigeria to help the Francophone African countries and their MOU is to look at how they can strengthen AIB, either through training or equipment. Come November, there is training dedicated for our investigators from France to go to France and learn something. Don’t forget, when you talk aviation, France is one of the leading countries in the world. They have majority shares in Airbus and there are many activities in France. There is so much we can learn from France. Take Saudi Arabia for instance, it is just because of the recently concluded Hajj, our agreement would have been signed because we have got clearance from the Ministry of Justice to go ahead and sign the agreement. Saudi Arabia has some expertise that we need and they are happy to come to Nigeria to train our team on that. What they will be coming to train us on is looking beyond the Fight Data Recorder and Cockpit Voice Recorder. We have met and discussed everything on the CVR and FDR. You need to look beyond that and that can help to make your report much better. For the Republic of Benin, what they have signed is to say whenever there is an accident, we should come and help them. They don’t have anything on ground, so they told us if we have training, we should please include them. We have an agreement with Gambia through BAGAIA. Today, we have helped Gambia to set up accident investigation agency through the help of Nigeria. We supported them in writing their regulations, the Act, the whole work. We even helped them with our SOP. They came to Nigeria, they sat with us and we put them through. They went back to Gambia. Today, it has been passed by their parliament. These are the kind of thing we are doing to help them. On the multi-modal, it is a huge scope, but one thing you have to agree with me is that AIB does not charge for the work we do, it is being funded by the Federal Government. All over the world, accident investigation is being funded by government and is not expected to charge for its services. NCAA does. They call it cost recovery, but we don’t charge anything. We expect to be funded, that is the norm. We are like the United Nations kind of operation. The more accidents we have, the more money it costs AIB, because all these investigations cost us money. If you look at the new Act that is currently with the Senate, we have increased our scope to ensure it is widened to accommodate enough room for AIB to be able to function, to be able to support its operations, to be able to train, buy more equipment necessary and to support the whole system as a whole. That is our strategy on that.

I want to look at what your manpower will be when you begin with the multi-modal project? Will you be operating from the airport here?

If you understand our set up, it has four office locations. We are in Lagos, Abuja, Enugu and Kano. You don’t build Rome in one day. This will be a gradual process. We need to first of all utilise the maximum of what we have before we do a proper need assessment, whether we are going to increase our point or we are good at four points, but these are decisions that will be taken in a later stage. I cannot really comment on that now.

You are expanding now and the challenges are going to be enormous. As at today, there is a committee that was set up to find out how your recommendations assist with safety. Are you satisfied with that? The number of deaths on the roads is far more than air. Are you confident that what you will give out in terms of recommendations will be implemented?

I am happy you have been following the trend when a committee was set up to look into the implementation and effectiveness of those safety recommendations that AIB has issued since inception. I was the chairman of that committee and we came up with the final result of 62 per cent of safety recommendations that were implemented. Partially implemented were 18 per cent and the rest were not implemented. You need to understand one thing. Safety recommendations can be issued to an airline. For instance, there was a helicopter crash; the first safety recommendation issued to that company was a Bell Helicopter. Unfortunately, the company went burst, even before the safety recommendations came out. Some safety recommendations may not be implemented because of cost. For us and NCAA, I have had a meeting with the Director General of NCAA, we have agreed on how to work on MoU basis. We have sent in a proposal and we are waiting for his response because AIB and NCAA need to work together as a team on MoU that will guide our relationship. For clarity sake, I have read some things in the newspapers when somebody said NCAA doesn’t have to implement AIB’s recommendations. It is either the person doesn’t understand aviation or how things work from AIB’s perspective or just trying to be mischievous. I will tell you the process. When we are done with our investigation, we send the final draft to NCAA, among other stakeholders, for their review and we give them 60 days to come back to us to tell us why they are not implementable.

We don’t just issue safety recommendations for issuing sake. We give the stakeholders opportunity to comment. That is why we call it 60-day window. We are trying to shorten it to 30 days so that our reports can be out on time. You can imagine you completed reports and you have to give 60 days; that is two months just for stakeholders to read, comment and get back to you. You need to trust AIB. We need to build a world class institution so that when we talk you will listen. This is what we have been doing in the last two and half years to make sure that AIB is a credible institution that everybody would listen when it talks. That is very important. It is same all over the world. The US NTSB don’t have it in their regulations that if you don’t comply they will send you to jail. It is not so with also. We are making it easy, we work with you. We give you time to assess our recommendations and discuss with us if you think it is not right. On the road, I will give you an example that there is a crash and the vehicle summersaulted caused by a huge ditch or pot hole on the road and we issue a safety recommendation to FERMA to fix the ditch. We will work with FERMA the same thing we are doing with NCAA. Once that pot hole is fixed, this is how you can prevent all these needless deaths. People die every day on our roads. The problem is that nobody investigated anything, nobody checks anything, nobody says this is what we need to do to prevent future occurrence. We have tanker fire accidents many times; have you read any recommendation on how to prevent it? These are the things we are going to fix. The people that don’t want to comply with it, it’s either they don’t know or they just don’t want to comply.

Wole Shadare