FAAN Assures On World Class Airports

Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN) has reiterated its resolve to transform the nation’s airports to meet international standards.

The Managing Director of FAAN, George Uriesi who stated this while speaking with newsmen, decried the poor state of facilities at the airports.

He said the authority had concluded plans to make the airports economically viable so as to yield money for their maintenance and other investments in the industry.

According to him, “FAAN is not the same any more. We are dealing with business, not to indulge in wastefulness and purposelessness. We are re-modelling a number of airports”.

“In Nigeria when you dialogue and keep on dialoguing, you end up doing nothing, so, by the time we shall be commissioning what we have achieved in the next few months, people will understand why we did what we did”, he added.

He noted that the facilities at the Murtala Mohammed International Airport, the busiest airport in the country, were over-stretched beyond the scope of design and capacity as a result of the increase in passengers’ traffic.

“The problem with Murtala Mohammed Airport, Lagos is obsolete infrastructure. We started it too late. The infrastructure did not develop with traffic. We closed our main park; we stopped planning and shot ourselves in the foot. Airport parking is a serious non-aero-nautical revenue-generating source. Developing programme for the airports should be institutionalised.

He also mentioned that the authority had drawn lessons from airports located at embattled cities like Kano and Maiduguri saying “there have been series of meeting about security and there should be high level of cooperation among security operatives and other stakeholders in the industry.

He assured that the federal government would deploy sophisticated security equipment to the airports and upgrade its personnel to tackle any security threat.

The FAAN boss attributed the delay in the installation of airfield lighting at Lagos and other airports in the country to paucity of funds, adding that the authority would fix the airfield lighting as promised.

“It is an aberration to build a runway without runway lighting. It is unacceptable. When the budget is approved we will fix the airfield lighting at the airports.

Reward Akwu