The Managing Director of Nigerian Airspace Management Agency (NAMA), Tayib Odunowo, have said that as part of repositioning strategy that the Agency is targeting completing over 20 major ongoing projects.

The NAMA MD, while speaking with Aviation Metric on the sidelines of an interaction with the media in Lagos noted that the completion and deployment projects which he did not mention would help the agency in service delivery and rank the country better in air navigation services.

He however expressed concern over the paucity of funds which he noted is posing a huge change and one that could truncate the delivery of the project.

As a result of scarcity of financial resources, Odunowo said the NAMA management had constituted a project review committee whose report is ‘Almost ready’, stressing that they were going to be handing the interim report to the Minister of Aviation and Aerospace Development, Mr. Festus Keyamo this week.

“We’re going through all these projects. We are reviewing it. We are re-scoping them because some of them are obsolete. Some of them need to be re-scoped. Some actually need to be truncated. So we need to take a hard decision because guess what? We can’t afford it.”

He disclosed that the airspace agency was working and re-positioning the country’s airspace for efficiency and service delivery but equally lamented that people have encroached on lands belonging to the agency and the carting away of properties belonging to the agency.

“But the governments are taking them over. We’re losing them. We have close to 100 properties. I don’t know where our legal director is. She was supposed to be here. I don’t know what happened to her. She’s handling a lot of the cases because we have close to 50 and with the director right here, they are strategising on our properties because there are about 40 or 50 that have encroachments.

“We have land, but they are in combat. We have to go to court. We have about 40 or 50 with no documents. So that right now, that process has commenced and we’re doing that.”

Odunowo further disclosed that his agency had undertaken the calibration of some aerodromes in the country, saying many of the airports in the country are private, military, and joint-user airports.

“We acquired an aircraft for flight calibration and we also recruited both inspectors and flight crew, for the purpose of doing the flight calibration. This takes time. The requirement for them to be certified for calibration is not something that we can bypass.

“they were recruited, we were trained both in the United States and the United Kingdom and they’ve been doing more or less what we call on-the-job training to get fully certified for the team to independently carry out flight calibration. Now, that team has been undergoing training and they’re going to complete final training for what we call flight commissioning.”

“There is a newly installed navigational facility to do flight checks. It’s called flight commissioning and after that is flight calibration. So, for the team to do flight commissioning, they should be rounding up their on-the-job training in November with our technical partners from the U.K. and after that, this team can confidently carry out flight commissioning, which is the last phase.”

“But before then, what they have qualified for this year is to do routine flight calibration and they have been doing that for all the other airports in the country.”

The last areas of commissioning that were pending according to him were Bayelsa Airport and Anambra Airport, where they had newly installed navigational facilities.

“Our team has undertaken extensive flight calibration of navigational facilities in other airports outside the international. Now, these are some of the findings as far as the audit was concerned. And like I said, if you have a state government airport, the responsibility is for the airport operator to request and also pay for the flight calibration.”

“Anambra will now come in to check the equipment with us. Apart from maintaining the aircraft, we also pay the technical partners that have been partnering with us since 2019. And so, cost recovery is required. So, if a state airport is not calibrated, you can’t blame them specifically. So, issues of that nature created a gap when some airports had their facilities not calibrated”, he added. – Aviation Metrics.