Follow Us on Google
Foreign carriers flying into Nigerian airports under the ‘open sky agreement’ are stifling the offshore expansion projects of Nigerian airlines, says Chairman/Chief Executive Officer of Air Peace Limited, Mr. Allen Onyema.
Onyema stated this during the official presentation of the membership certificate of the International Air Transport Association (IATA) to Air Peace in Lagos recently. He decried the ordeal that local airlines are made to go through to secure permits to fly outside Nigerian and reciprocate routes granted to foreign airlines flying into nigeria.
Speaking on the rigorous process Air Peace went through before securing its IATA Operation Safety Audit (IOSA) certificate and IATA membership, Onyema urged other countries to stop frustrating Nigerian airlines from operating into their domains on the basis of aero politics even when they have met all known civil aviation regulation requirements to commence such flights.
“A lot of foreign airlines do not want Nigerian airlines to succeed.. It has to stop. If it continues I will go to court because they cannot be coming into our country while they prevent us from flying into theirs,” said Onyema.
“Air Peace has not been stopped (from flying outside Nigeria) yet, but I have seen others. Nigerian airlines deserved to also benefit from the open skies arrangement foreign airlines had capitalised on to expand their operations to the country,” he added.
Onyema wondered why some countries would impose impossible conditions for Nigerian airlines to operate into their airports when the Nigerian carrier had passed all global assessments for international flight operations.
He assured the IATA team that Air Peace would continue to insist on safe and exceptional flight services.
The carrier’s membership of IATA, he added, would greatly boost its drive to further expand to the West Coast of Africa and connect international routes, including Dubai, Houston, London, Mumbai, Guangzhou-China and Johannesburg.
For his part, IATA’s Area Manager, South-West Africa, Dr Samson Fatokun, who presented the membership certificate of the global aviation body to Air Peace, commended the airline for making scaling the audit and becoming IATA compliant.
Only about 300 carriers of the thousands of airlines operating globally, he said, were listed in the association’s registry because of the stringent admission process.
“We have requirements for any airline that wants to belong to the IATA brand and one of that requirement is that they must pass the IATA Operational Safety Audit (IOSA) and this has kept most of them back. IATA comes with a requirement of quality and people expect the airline to operate with recommended standards of aviation globally,” he said.
