The chairman, West-Link Airlines, Capt Ibrahim Mshelia in this short interview comments on inadequate infrastructure at Nigeria’s airports and the attendant effects on airline operations and passenger facilitation.
Ime Akpan
Belated expansion of infrastructure
Check-in counters are part of suitable accommodation to process passengers. So a terminal building should be spacious enough to take the number of intending partners. Every operator writes to the authorities and tells them ‘we intend to begin operating at a particular time.’ The airport authority is supposed to acknowledge that. Now I think over the years what we’ve done, we just keep taking in the airlines and we don’t expand infrastructure. For example, Arik, Air Peace, Ibom Air, Aero, and Dana these five airlines alone, by the time they schedule 7 o’clock departure on the average let’s say the passengers on these aero planes will be between 120 and 170, depending on the aircraft. If you are going to do 120 by five airlines, they need to check them in, that would be 600 passengers. Now that will take you quite some time to check in; because of the space and infrastructural deficit, it takes up to five minutes to check in one passenger. So, even if you say two minutes to check in a passenger, how many counters would you need to be able to check in those people within the two hour rate that they give? They give you two hours to check in passengers so you will need 300 check-in counters if you’re going to use two minutes per passenger. If you have no space, you have congestion and then you have chaos and then you have commotion at the end. So passenger delay, sorting their baggage, access to the tarmac, move the bags, number of vehicles that can do it and so on. There are so many things that are combined in the infrastructure that we are talking about. There is infrastructure but the capacity of airlines have overwhelmed it and one wonders why all these years nothing was done to expand it until only recently that they are doing some expansion.
Common use passenger processing system
The common use is due to lack of infrastructure expansion; they are using that one to find an easy way out of expanding the airport but you need the space. No matter what you do human traffic will still come with their luggage and that commotion will still be there or you introduce a slot system. But by the time you introduce a slot system, you are limiting the capacity of the airline and you should not do that. Slot system for domestic airlines shouldn’t be the case; you should construct more terminals.
Way forward
Let me tell you a quick fix; I know there are spaces in Abuja that are not being used, open them up to the domestic airlines. Like the old international airport terminal, it is not being used properly. So why don’t you open all of it? That would solve the problems. In Lagos another thing you can also do is – between these two airports…there is no problem with this daylight operations – you see Abuja bound traffic is checking in; Warri-bound traffic is checking in, etc. So, the quick fix is open up all the airport to midnight. If you do so, the airlines on their own will naturally adjust their schedules and give space. It would naturally mitigate this without doing anything to the current infrastructure. If you open the airport to close at midnight, you have solved a lot of the problems already and in Abuja open up the old international terminal that is not being used.
Airports not operating 24/7
Well, the problem is systemic; aviation requires experts, everybody who is supposed to head an airline, aviation parastatal must be an expert so that we speak the same language. To begin with, conveyor belt breaking down once in a year is acceptable. However, I do not see a reason why a conveyor belt will break down in the first place, or screening machines should break down in the first place. Which means the people who are manning it are either nonchalant or incompetent. Particularly, for me I am a pilot and I’ve visited a lot of countries inside the region and beyond. I’ve never heard of these equipment breaking down; I’ve never heard it anywhere except Nigeria because we do not allow our best hands to run our affairs. The thing is supposed to be serviced every two minutes for example – money is voted for it if you go to the books – but if you go to the people managing the conveyor belt they’d tell you they have not serviced it in the last 20 years. So where is the money going to? Corruption is killing these equipment at the airports, lack of attention due to corruption. Every machine being designed has its own servicing procedures and age; this is an airport we are talking about and everything is done for safety and timing. We should endeavour to do things properly and this problem will go away. Conveyor belts will not break down and if it does it’s once in a blue moon and it’s acceptable. Look at the obsolete things we have in the airport. Why can’t we upgrade then when we should upgrade them? So it is still about our intention to do the right things or not.
