One of such security implications, according to the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN), is the menace of bird strikes. Birds which strike aircraft engines use abandoned aircraft as hiding places before finding their ways into the engines of other aircraft.
Bird strikes occur most often during take-off or landing of a plane or during low altitude flight. Some air crashes occur when the bird hits the windscreen or flies into the engines of a plane.
Speaking on this, an aviation expert, Captain Dele Ore, said apart from debasing the looks of the airports, the planes are also dangerous to passengers.
According to him, it is easy for birds and other wild animals to hide in abandoned planes and from there creep into planes at the tarmac ready to take off and cause flight problems.
Saturday Tribune’s investigations revealed that there are over 100 of such aircraft currently sitting idly in the various airports — a situation which has made the airports an eyesore to first-time visitors into the country and even other airport users.
Efforts so far made by FAAN to clear the mess have been frustrated by the owners, who have used their connections to retain their aircrafts in the airports.
For several years, FAAN has been issuing orders to owners of such aircraft to remove them from the airports, but without results, as investigation revealed that aircraft that have been abandoned for over 20 years by some defunct airlines still sit on the hangars at the various airports across the country.
It is no longer news that the issue of abandoned aircraft across the nation’s airports has been generating debates in the past decade between FAAN (the authority directly responsible for the management of airports) and some airline operators, who are men of means in the society.
Saturday Tribune discovered that the over 100 abandoned aircraft belong to Albarka, owned by Brigadier-General Muhammed Buba Marwa (rtd); Okada Air, owned by Chief Gabriel Osawaru Igbinedion, the Esama of Benin; Chanchangi, which belongs to the business magnate, Alhaji Ahmadu Chanchangi; Concord Airlines owned by the late business mogul, Chief Moshood Abiola.
Other abandoned aircraft include those of NICON Airways, owned by Mr Jimoh Ibrahim, Chairman, Global Fleet; Kabo Air, owned by the late Alhaji Dan Kabo. Others are Bellview, Triax, Oriental, Sosoliso, Dasab, Chrome, EAS, Afrijet, Gas Air, Freedom Air and Capital Air.
Efforts made in the past by FAAN to dispose of the aircraft were frustrated by litigations instituted by the owners.
A visit to the airports, especially the international airports, would reveal some dirty-looking aircraft of all sizes and types parked on the hangar.
At the Murtala Muhammed Airport, for instance, there are close to 50 disused aeroplanes occupying a large space, some of them belonging to Bellview, Sosoliso, Nigeria Airways, Space World and Concord.
At the Benin airport, over 19 of such aircraft, belonging to Okada Air, have taken over a large portion of the airport, while the Kano airport has continued to house a similar number of disused aircraft belonging to Kabo Air.
The airline once operated with so much promise and complemented the efforts of the liquidated Nigeria Airways and had the largest fleet of BAC 1-11 and B727, with over 29 planes in its fleet. It took part in air lifting of Muslim pilgrims for hajj operations with its jumbo B747.
This is the case in virtually all the airports, and key players in the industry had in the past raised the alarm over the security implications of the continued presence of abandoned planes in the country’s airports.
Many of these airlines performed creditably well in the 1980s to early 1990s until they collapsed due to challenges, and since then, the owners have not been able to revive them.
Former Minister of Aviation, Fidelia Njeze, once inaugurated a committee to advise her on how to address the menace constituted by the parking of disused airplanes at strategic areas of the nation’s airports, which she noted portends danger.
She inaugurated a 12-member committee on the removal of the disabled aircraft, chaired then by Captain Mohammed Ruma, the Director of Safety and Technical Policy Department of the ministry in Abuja.
Besides the security implications, FAAN also loses billions of naira to the parking of abandoned planes at positions where operational airlines could have parked functional planes.
Under FAAN’s financial policy on the domestic scene, each aircraft parked on the tamarc is expected to pay between N1,500 and N2,000 per hour. The agency would have lost several billions of naira to the presence of the abandoned planes, as their owners just left the unused planes at the airports without paying for the portions they occupy.
The Managing Director of FAAN, Mr. George Uriesi, said: “The abandoned aircraft pose potential safety hazard to airport operations and have over the years constituted an eyesore at our airports.”
During one of the warnings issued to the airline owners to remove the abandoned planes, the FAAN boss once declared: “If the affected airlines fail to remove the disused aircraft on or before the deadline, the authority will be compelled to remove them, and the affected airlines made to pay for the costs of such removals.”
All the threats have been ignored, as several months after the warning was issued, the abandoned planes are still occupying the same spaces at the airports.
However, a fresh warning has again been issued by the FAAN through its public affairs unit, giving owners of the aircraft one month to remove them from the airports.
Speaking on behalf of FAAN, Yakubu Dati, the General Manager, Corporate Communications, said the management of FAAN would soon start the removal of all abandoned aircraft from all airports in the country.
The exercise, he said, had become necessary because the aircraft constitute a safety hazard, apart from being an eyesore at these airports, as some of these aircraft have been abandoned for over 10 years.
He said: “The authority is constrained to embark on this removal exercise because owners of these abandoned aircraft have deliberately refused to remove them despite all efforts made to make them do so, including meetings with the owners and publication of paid notices in various newspapers in the past five years.
“Some of the owners of these abandoned aircraft had taken FAAN to court over this issue and got court injunctions that made it difficult for the authority to carry out this exercise before now. Some of these cases have now been concluded, hence the commencement of the removal exercise — at least for the abandoned aircraft which cases have been concluded.
“The authority hereby calls on all owners of abandoned aircraft to remove them from all our airports within the next one month, as the presence of these aircraft negates the spirit of the current aviation master plan of the Federal Government.”
While it is not clear whether or not this latest warning will be ignored, it has become worrisome that aircraft of various types have continued to be abandoned at airports.
Speaking further on the implication of the abandoned planes, FAAN noted: “The presence of the disused planes can attract strangers to the airport environment, as well as people of questionable character wanting to sell the scrap.
“By the end of this month, we are going ahead to remove the planes in the overall public interest. We have given enough time to the owners to do so, but some have not.
“We are not happy that a significant number of old aircraft belonging to inactive operators currently create awful scenery several metres along the runway of many domestic airports across the country.”
Steve Mahonwu, Chairman of Airline Operators of Nigeria (AON), once said that the aircraft owners would remove the aircraft if FAAN obeyed international practices by providing adequate ‘graveyards’ for the airlines.
“ICAO convention provides that the agency provides adequate spaces for abandoned aircraft. When we have befitting places for the aircraft, the airlines will move them,” Mahonwu said.
But FAAN had insisted that the agency had provided a graveyard at the international wing of the Murtala Muhammed Airport in Lagos, adding that the airlines had not made any move to obey FAAN’s order even when they knew the consequence of leaving the aircraft at the airports.
Many stakeholders are not comfortable with the development, basing their arguments on the current state of national security.
But the Assistant Secretary-General of the AON, Alhaji Mohammed Tukur, believes there is an urgent need for FAAN to meet with the owners of the abandoned aircraft on how to remove them.
He said the need for all parties to meet became important in the sense that aircraft are not like cars that can be towed away easily into any car park. He added that there was no point keeping unused aircraft at the airport when the portion the aircraft currenttly occupy could be used to build maintenance hangar.
Tukur urged the affected operators to cooperate with FAAN to rid the airports of this unnecessary obstruction.
Tukur believes the abandoned aircraft pose safety problems. Apart from obscuring the airside, he noted that they occupy space during operational and emergency-related hours.
One passenger who simply identified himself as Seye attributed the takeover of the airports by abandoned aircraft to the failure of government to tackle the issue with sincerity in line with global practice.
“From what I heard, they said the owners of the planes are rich people who think they can bend the rules to favour them whenever they like. Since they all have private jets, they care less about the safety of other Nigerians. But they cannot continue to have their way every time as nemesis will catch up with them very soon.
“Those rusty planes infested with algae once provided flights and comfort as the ones that are flying now; but they have gone the way of publicly owned Nigeria Airways. The private airlines have abandoned them like human corpses at Nigerian airports.”
According to information gathered by the Saturday Tribune, buyers of such unused aircraft overseas sell them to people who eventually convert them to living spaces, having reconfigured them.
An aircraft engineer who spoke to Saturday Tribune cited how one of the aircraft in the fleet of the former Nigeria Airways, which was flown to Belgium for maintenance but could not be brought back due to lack of funds, was turned to a restaurant in the country, as an alternative way of making money.
Another way of recycling unused aircraft was displayed recently in Benoit, a town in Bolivar County, Mississippi State, United States, where a lady who needed accommodation decided to buy an unused aircraft for $2,000 and subsequently reconfigured it into a new home.
Investigations revealed that there are many people who deal in aluminium and cutlery and similar items willing to buy these abandoned planes to convert them to other uses.
It was gathered that disused aircraft attracts as high as N500,000, depending on the state of such aircraft.
The aircraft engineer added that anyone with over 10 disused aircraft could make as much as N5 million. This he noted was more profitable than littering the airports with such disused aircraft.
Many stakeholders have urged the government to quickly treat cases filed by owners of abandoned aircraft so as to make it easy for FAAN to dispose of them, if the owners fail to consider what they describe as national interest.
Source: http://www.tribune.com.ng
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