Limited Resources Hindering Accident Investigation – Usman

In this interview with NKEM OSUAGWU, Commissioner, Accident Investigation Bureau (AIB), Captain Muhtar Usman highlights some challenging and significant achievements in AIB since he came into office in December 2011.

Sir, what have been your major achievements and challenges in office?

As usual, when you come into a new office, you have to first assess the environment even though, I was an insider. So, I know some of the areas we needed to work on; the human capacity and equipment in particular. In the area of human resources, we intensified our trainings; we tried to improve a lot in terms of training because the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) recommends that a body like ours should be a body of professionals and the quality of the people that are to be employed as investigators should be of international standards. It is recommended that we should attract and retain qualified and experienced personnel in sufficient number and everybody knows that to attract and maintain aviation professionals is not cheap.

We tried as much as possible to attract and retain them by improving the welfare of the staff members and also give them the relevant training because training is a tool for them to be able to perform.

On equipment, when I came in, we did not have that in place even though the process had started acquiring what we call the black box decoder. This is a flight safety laboratory, which is used to download and analyze recordings from aircraft involved in accident. In terms of equipment, we have the flight safety laboratory in place now, which has the capability of downloading, analyzing flight recorders from aircraft whether involved in an accident or not. If it involves an accident, we use it to determine the cause of the accident and we can make recommendations to avoid future occurrences and we can use it proactively because the focus of AIB now is accident prevention.

In addition, the laboratory has the capability to animate those data that we collect, present them in a form of graphs to know what the aircraft was actually doing.

Furthermore, an approval has been given and the construction has already started for wreckage reconstruction hangar that is used to store, analyze wreckage from accidents. Our main focus now is to prevent an accident from happening and if it does happen, we should be able to know the cause and make safety recommendations to prevent other accidents from happening.

Parts of the challenges when we came into office was the absence of condition of service for our staff and we were able to get a temporary condition of service from the NCAA that was approved for us, which we have started implementing. We’ve been given the condition of service for two years pending the approval of the AIB’s own.

Why is AIB relocating to Abuja after the first attempt in 2008 failed?

First of all, I will like to say life is not static, two, as you noted, AIB was created in 2006 with the headquarters in Abuja. It was relocated to Lagos later and then there was a directive in 2008 for all the agencies in the sector to relocate their corporate headquarters to Abuja and the decisions were informed by so many things. There are several countries in the world which have their accident investigation department in their federal capitals. For instance, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), in the United States, which is equivalent to AIB, its headquarters is located in Washington D.C, which is the capital of the US.

The location of accident investigation agencies is not necessarily in an area where we have so many activities because we deal with research and development.

There are two sides to accident investigations; the onside and off-side investigation. The onside is what you need to gather as soon as possible and once you have a regional office that is nearby, they can always respond to it, the off-side is the one that you do in your office : analysis, interviews that you need to conduct in your office or even go to the operator or even the regulators and so on.

So, it is not really about where the most commercial activities are taking place, but a place that it is conducive to actually work. If you look at the number of times you have to get to Abuja from wherever you are to get things done, quantify the time, also quantify the cost, you will find out that it is much cheaper for the corporate headquarters of organizations to be around Abuja.

Was that why your management relocated the agency’s laboratory from Lagos to Abuja?

I don’t like the word relocate; I prefer to use the word locate. The laboratory was never relocated, but located in Abuja by the management. The practice worldwide is that the laboratories are located in the headquarters and I can tell you that since 2008 when the directive was given, the location of the laboratory started. If people are saying that we are now relocating to Abuja, it is a process that started way back in 2008. The laboratory was never located in Lagos, it was meant to be located at the AIB headquarters and it is located at the headquarters in Abuja. It wasn’t dismantled from here and moved to Abuja.

What are the major challenges of AIB?

Funding is a major challenge. government has been doing very well as I said, but we need much more because resources sometimes limit to accident investigation. Like in the case of Dana Air, we had to send the two engines out; the cost of shipping, the cost of doing the tear down to establish, cost a lot of money. People had to travel to other countries.

Before now, we used to do flight recorder outside Nigeria to decode the analysis, but government has come to our aid in this regards. We are the only country in Africa that has this capability now. That will save us time because the idea behind it is to cut down on time. As I told you earlier, accident investigation is a public service, they don’t charge for it, but then, you have to queue up to get your time. But if you have your own facilities, then, automatically, yours becomes a priority. That is the benefit we have by having our own and we are also able to support other people by bringing in their own recorder, we are also going to learn a lot and apply it in Nigeria because if we are able to see any hazard based on the data that we have from another country’s accident, we are automatically a party to an investigation.

When are you releasing the final report on the Dana Air crash?

Our target is to finish as soon as possible. I talked of funding earlier but there are other things that are dependent may be not directly on funding. We don’t have all the facilities available to us and no country in the world has except may be a very few. For instance, we don’t have aircraft manufacturers here; there are things that sometimes you have to go back to the manufacturers to do. Also, we are still expecting a lot of tests and analyses which is dependent on either laboratories or other agencies we don’t have control over. That is why I cannot tell you the particular time the final report would come out.

Original article: http://leadership.ng