As the Lagos-bound Boeing 727 drops through the thick cloud covering Nigeria’s swampy coastal lowlands, a nervous passenger crosses himself and says a brief prayer.
The concerned business traveller is just hoping the flight touches down safely, but he might also find room in his prayers for Nigeria’s beleaguered private aviation sector.
On May 4 a Nigerian domestic flight crashed into a crowded suburb of the northern city of Kano, killing at least 148 people on board and on the ground and throwing the industry into crisis.
Reacting to public anger, the federal government swung into action; grounding the offending plane model, the BAC 1-11, which is the elderly workhorse of many Nigerian fleets.
Tougher still, all planes more than 22 years old will be banned within five years, a measure that could effectively bring to an end Nigeria’s two-decade-old adventure in deregulated air travel.
The industry and independent experts are horrified, and claim the ban is a kneejerk gesture that could force every private carrier out of the skies.
“I believe the government has over-reacted once again. It is sentiment rather than reason,” Ikedi Uko, a Nigerian aviation consultant, said.
The industry’s problem is not, Uko and other experts argue, the age of the planes, but a failure of government to enforce maintenance standards and international bias against Nigerian airlines.
No private Nigerian carrier is licensed to fly lucrative international routes and in the low-fare internal market they are facing unfair competition from foreign firms, he said.
Since Nigeria’s skies were deregulated in the early 1980s, more than a dozen private carriers, some with only one plane, have sprung up to ply the airlanes of the large West African state.
The firms offer cheap travel in a country where road trips can be long and dangerous, prey to accidents and bandits.
But maintenance standards on the second-hand jets bought from rich-world airlines are widely regarded as catastrophic.
“The airlines are selling 5 000 naira ($37) tickets to Abuja. If they were allowed to fly to Ghana for $200 they could make money and get loans to get newer planes,” Uko said.
Chukwuma Nwokoh of The Guardian, who has reported on aviation since 1986, says: “It’s a simple question of economics. How can a Nigerian airline afford a new plane for $40-million?”
Uko recommends that government should make it a priority to enforce international standards so that Nigerian planes might be licensed to fly abroad, but fears it has another goal.
“The idea is that Nigerians cannot run aviation,” he said. “If we cannot do it why not get someone else to run it?”
The government is content to see Nigerian carriers go to the wall, he fears, and allow foreign firms to move in.
Already foreign embassies and multinationals ban their staff from flying on many Nigerian airlines, preferring foreign registered fleets of turboprop planes to elderly jets.
A three day trip by an AFP reporter from Lagos to the federal capital Abuja revealed both sides of Nigerian air travel.
The outward leg was with Aero Contractors, a Dutch-Nigerian joint venture which began work shuttling air company workers around Nigeria and has now developed a network of regular routes.
It runs a fleet of turbo-prop planes which are reputed to be reliable but are slow, taking an hour and a half to fly 780 kilometres to Abuja, and expensive at 14 000 naira ($100) one-way.
“A false idea is being created that turboprops are safer,” claims Uko, “Besides how can Nigerians afford to pay 15 500 naira for a ticket to Port Harcourt?”
AFP’s return trip on a ragged looking Trans Saharan Airways 727 was quicker, cheaper at only 6 000 naira ($45), and a lot less reassuring.
It was not clear how old the plane is, nor where it came from, but the internal sign panels are in Spanish and the decor had a distinctly retro feel.
In contrast to the European executives and diplomats who made up the bulk of those on the Aero Contractors’ flight, the Trans Saharan passenger list is almost exclusively Nigerian.
The flight took off directly into the blustery tail of a tropical storm, but it was so quick that passengers were still drinking their scalding hot coffee when it bumped in to land.
The relief on landing was palpable. And a huge ironic cheer went up when a lucky passenger won a return ticket in the boarding card prize draw.
He should probably use it quickly, the Nigerian airline industry is heading for a shakeup. – AFP