NAMA Installs Surveillance Radar System

Nigerian Airspace Management Agency
(NAMA) has completed its aerial surveillance radar system that will enable
pilots transit from one aerial control to another.

The managing director of the agency,
Nnamdi Udoh who disclosed this to newsmen said the equipment would provide
seamless communication between the controller and the pilots from departure to
destination airport.

“If you are taking off from Lagos,
you don’t have to change your squak (code used by a pilot to communicate with
air traffic controller) to Port Harcourt, Abuja or Kano. The controller will
transfer you seamlessly to the next radar and maintain the same squak to land.
Prior to this, we were having procedural aerial control but now we are going to
use surveillance aerial control”, he said.

According to him, “if you are
looking at Cameroun, Togo, Niger, Chad, the Oceania, you will see that we are
strategically positioned to embrace that section of the airspace. And all we
need is to have some kind of wide aerial multi-lateration system to link up the
other countries”.

“All we need is one system and a
switch and all the systems in Africa will talk to one another. You don’t really
have to physically see the infrastructure. It’s like roaming a phone. Something
is there that is making you connect anywhere you go. It is double. It can be
achieved overtime. The major thing is the political will. Africa is a big
airspace. The African Union, International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO)
and other relevant bodies should be involved.

He attributed the numerous awards
received by the agency to its invaluable contribution to the safety of the
nation’s airspace.

He noted that between January and
September this year, the agency received four different awards including the
gold award presented to NAMA and the individual award given to the managing
director at the 18th conference of Aviation and Allied Business Leadership in
Windhock, Namibia recently.

Reward Akwu