By Chinelo Obogo
Chairman West Link Airline, Capt. Ibrahim Mshelia, has tasked the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria ( FAAN) to extend operation time at the Lagos Airports to midnight and open up the old Abuja International Airport Terminal for domestic use.
According to him, these are some quick fixes barring any expansion to existing terminal infrastructure that would enable travel facilitation to reduce congestion at the airports.
Mshelia who analysed the current situation airlines are grappling with, said the local operators are growing with more aircraft and route expansion but are constrained limited terminals capacity.
He said if five airlines all with aircraft of over 100 passenger capacity were to take off at 7am from one of the terminals even at two minutes processing time, before concluding with half of these five airlines’ capacity, there is already a massive delay.
He said, “I think over the years what we’ve done is we just keep taking in the airlines and we don’t do the infrastructure expansion. For example, fibve of the airlines including Arik, Air Peace, Ibom Air, Aero, Dana schedule 7 o’clock departure, how many of them can the existing capacity allow to fly out at the same time.
“Averagely, let’s say the passengers on these aeroplanes will be between 120-170 depends on the aircraft, if you are going to do 120 by 5 airlines, they need to check them in (I’m just giving you a typical example) that would be 600 passengers, now that will take you quite some time to check in because of the space and infrastructural deficit, it takes up to five minutes to check in one passenger, it does. So, even if you say two minutes to check in a passenger, how many counters would you need to be able to check in those people within the two hour rate that they give? “They give you two hours to check in passengers so you will need 300 check in counters if you’re going to use two minutes by passengers. If you have no space, then you have congestion and then you have chaos and then you have commotion at the end. So passenger delay, sorting their baggage, access to the tarmac, move the bags, number of vehicles that can do it and so on.