Domestic Flights Can’t Resume June 21 – FG

Domestic flights will no longer resume on June 21, Minister of Aviation Hadi Sirika said yesterday.

The minister spoke during the briefing by members of the Presidential Task Force on COVID-19 in Abuja.

He also explained that a new date would be fixed. This will be after a report is submitted the Task Force for review next week.

The minister was represented by the Director-General of the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA), Captain Musa Nuhu.

According to Sirika, the ministry had developed and sent a circular to all stakeholders. This is so as to develop a restart plan and submit to the regulatory body for review and approval depending on the business of the service providers.

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According to him, the restart plan is meant to cover airworthiness, operations, passenger licencing,. aviation security, safety management system, consumer protection, and air transport regulation.

“We never said aviation is going to start definitely on the 21st, we were supposed to put a report back based on what we have and we have some work to do. As such, June 21 is not a feasible date to resume operations.

“Despite the pressure from different quarters, we will not start operation on any date until we are sure we can start operating in an efficient manner.”

He explained that there was a lot of work to be done before operations could resume in the aviation sector.

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“Prior to this mandate from the presidential task force, the regulatory body, NCAA, had developed advisory circulars distributed to the different sectors of the industry. These circulars required all sectors of industry to present a restart plan to the regulatory body for approval.

“A lot of service providers have provided their restart plans.  These restart plans are to be reviewed by the civil aviation authority.

“When we review those documents if we are happy with those documents. Then we will go to each individual organisation to verify what they have given as their restart plan.

“Some provided inadequate documents and their documents were sent back to them.  Significant progress has been made but there is still a lot of work to be done. The aviation system is a very complex system and this system has been compounded with the public health care concept which a lot of them in the aviation system are not used to implementing.”

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