If you love travelling by air at nights or weekends, this story may make you have a rethink.
Reason: The Air Marshal Paul Dike Presidential Task Force on the Aviation Industry says that radars at the nation�s airports are left unmanned at those times.
This, according to its final report, contributes to the series of fatal air crashes in the country.
A copy of the report, which was submitted to President Olusegun Obasanjo in March, was obtained by THE PUNCH in Abuja on Sunday.
The report, however, said lack of manpower was largely responsible for the poor manning of the radars.
It, therefore, advised that the National Airspace Management Agency needed to train more personnel to be able to man the radars on a 24-hour basis.
It said, �Currently, the radars at the airports are not manned at nights and on weekends due to low requisite manpower disposition. These radars should be manned 24 hours for the safe direction of aircraft and for monitoring purposes.�
The Paul Dike task force was set up by President Obasanjo after the September 22, 2005 Bellview Airline and the December 10, 2005 Sosoliso Airline crashes. No fewer than 225 passengers and crew members died in the two accidents which occurred on weekends.
About seven months after the task force completed its work, another accident involving an ADC Airline occurred on a weekend. Ninety six people, including Sultan Muhammadu Maccido of Sokoto, lost their lives in the crash.
The Dike report stated that for an industry, whose modus operandi involved the policing and enforcement of internationally stringent safety and security standards, to record several accidents within such a short space of time meant that there was a systemic failure.
The report painted lapses on the part of the Ministry of Aviation; pilots; the regulatory agencies; and airline operators.
On the part of the operators, the task force noted that they were too many in the �narrow� Nigerian aviation market.
It said the high number of operators brought about fierce competition on the few lucrative routes with diminished profit.
The report said, �Most of the aircraft in use are the Boeing 737 category and higher versions. In view of their relatively larger capacity in relation to smaller aircraft, the former cannot be deployed economically in smaller routes which act as feeders to major routes.
�In the final analysis, some of the airlines do not generate enough revenue to support such operations. With limited revenue, due to fierce competition, the majority of the airlines barely earn sufficient funds to keep afloat.�
According to the report, most of the airline operators take their aircraft abroad because they do not have their own hangars.
The Ministry of Aviation received several knocks from the task force for parading a large number of personnel who are not aviation professionals.
It noted that the average tenure of a Minister of Aviation since the nation�s independence was one and a half years. This, it said, meant frequent changes in policy and goals pursued by the ministry.
The report also observed that appointments of chief executives and key staff of agencies under the ministry were usually politicised.
After each incident in the industry, the report added, scapegoats were hurriedly identified and booted out under the guise of reorganisation instead of conducting a thorough investigation to identify the real culprits.
It said, �This has bred discontent among the staff of the agencies as those who are really guilty may be left untouched while innocent people sometimes have had their careers unjustifiably truncated.
�Another problem is the apprehension of staff over what is now perceived as arbitrariness on the part of senior management with respect to labour issues. In aviation, a disgruntled worker, the saying goes, is an accident waiting to happen.
�In the Airworthiness Department of the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority, very few of the inspectors had relevant practical experience or licence. Unlicensed, unqualified engineers were responsible for setting examination and licensing maintenance engineers.
�Unlicensed engineers were given responsibility to inspect airplanes for issuance of certificate of airworthiness and certificate of maintenance. The inspectors were perpetually globetrotting to carry out inspections.
�Some inspections that could be combined were split. An inspector would not combine the inspection of airplanes in the same country. He would rather collect an allowance for seven or days to inspect one airplane and return the next week to inspect the other.�