Hundreds of lives would have been lost yesterday in a near collision of aircraft when the communication and radar system of the Nigeria Airspace Management Agency (NAMA) broke down, leaving a dozen aircraft hovering in the air for several hours at the Murtala Muhammed International Airport (MMIA), Lagos.
Ethiopian Airlines, carrying 180 passengers on its way to Lagos from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, demanded emergency landing when its aircraft was running out of fuel as it hovered for several hours, waiting to be directed to land by the Air Traffic Controllers at the airport.
Also, a Qatar Airways aircraft with about 190 passengers also requested precautionary landing at about 2.30 pm after hovering for a long time as the aircraft was exhausting its fuel.
THISDAY investigations revealed that both communication and radar systems of NAMA were down at the airport and the controllers could not direct aircraft to land, which led to a crowded airspace – a critical safety situation.
With the near crash situation, other aircraft in the airspace had to give way for Ethiopian Airlines to land.
One of the pilots of the aircraft that hovered at the time told THISDAY that there was a point it became unsafe to remain at the airspace around Lagos and he requested to divert his aircraft to another airport.
Almost all other aircraft had lost so much fuel because they had all waited for more than two hours.
“We waited for hours and there was a time there were more than 15 aircraft in the airspace, which was risky, so I requested that I wanted to divert my aircraft to another airport. Already, our fuel for the flight had finished. We were waiting on endurance fuel,” the pilot said.
The Director-General of Nigeria Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA), Dr Harold Demuren, acknowledged the incident and said he did not have the details yet but he had directed his officials to investigate.
The pilot also told THISDAY that the safety consequence of the incident was that there were so many “air misses” (near collision) of aircraft as many of them converged on the same flight level.
“The long hours spent hovering exhausted the fuel of almost all the aircraft and because we were all converging almost on the same level it gave rise to many air misses, so many lives would have been lost if there were crashes,” he said.
The pilot said NAMA should have contingency plan whenever the radar fails, so that this kind of incident would not happen again.
“What happened today exposed the danger of not well-managed airspace; there would have been at least a collision and you know the consequence of that, but when the Ethiopian Airlines aircraft declared emergency so we had to allow it to land otherwise it would have crashed,” the pilot told THISDAY.
The radar in Lagos has just been installed as part of the Total Radar Coverage of Nigeria (TRACON) project, which went on stream a few months ago. Analysts found it surprising that it could break down so soon.
But THISDAY learnt from a NAMA official that power outage aborted the operations of the agency in Lagos and this lasted for several hours as there was no immediate alternative power source.
Although the agency has about two generators at the MMIA, Lagos, for three hours yesterday none was working when the public power supply from Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN) was cut off.
THISDAY also learnt that since August this year the agency had been powering its facilities in all the airports in the country.
“This is why we said that the airlines should pay us all the charges they owe us because we need the money to provide them service,” the source said.
The Secretary-General of African Airlines Association (AFRAA), Nick Fadugba, had warned of the danger of allowing airlines to hover around the Lagos airspace waiting with the poor communication and radar system in the Nigeria, noting that it is tantamount to endangering people’s lives.
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