By Derrick Bangura.

Senator Smart Adeyemi, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Aviation, has threatened that foreign airlines may be invited to operate domestic service in Nigeria if local airlines do not stop incessant flight delays and cancellations. The Airline Operators of Nigeria (AON) has expressed its displeasure with this threat.
In a statement signed by AON’s President and Chairman of Azman Air, Alhaji Yunusa Abdulmunaf, and other airline operators, including Max Air, United Nigeria Airlines, Ibom Air, Arik Air, Aero Contractors, Air Peace, Overland Airways, Green Africa, and Dana Air, the Senate Committee Chairman’s comments only served to aggravate sentiments and send out the wrong message to passengers and the general public, according to the statement.
Adeyemi made the warning while on a joint oversight visit to Lagos, during a joint oversight visit to the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority by the Senate and House of Representatives Committees on Aviation (NCAA).
AON, on the other hand, said in the statement that commercial airlines around the world, including in Nigeria, were set up with strict adherence to flight timings.
The AON noted that the schedules are put in place not only for the benefit of customers, but also to allow airlines maximise the use of their aircraft in order to meet up with their laid out targets over a period of time and ensure their safety and sustainability, adding that it is therefore not in the interest of any airline, whether in Nigeria or anywhere else, to delay or cancel flights as this has severe financial and image consequences.
“For these reasons, delays and cancellations are therefore the last thing any airline wants. While flight delays and cancellations occur all over the world, it is however instructive to note that in Nigeria, 80 per cent of the causes of delays and cancellations are due to factors that are neither in the control of airlines nor caused by them,” the operators said.
They also stressed that they operate in a very hostile environment with infrastructure decay and inefficiencies.
“This is why AON invites the public to be aware that airlines operating in Nigeria are forced to operate in an environment that is wrought with infrastructure deficiencies that are highly disruptive to normal schedule reliability and on time performance.
“Any airline in the world forced to operate under the domestic Nigerian circumstances would be bogged down by delays that they have no control over,” the statement said.
The operators itemised the causes of flight delays to include weather and explained that due to the lack of basic navigational and visual aids at most airports across the country, airlines are forced to delay flights unnecessarily, waiting for visibility to improve either at departure or destination airports.
“This is the major cause of delays in the months of October to March every year (with the harmattan dust haze and fog) and this impacts the entire system significantly.
“Almost every morning, the first flights to several destinations are delayed, affecting the schedule of the airline for the rest of the day. This issue of lack of navigational and visual aids at most of the airports in the country accounts for more than 50 per cent of the delays in the system, for which airlines unfairly always take the fall.