Air Traffic Engineers Decry Lack Of Spare Parts

Members of the
    National Association of Air Traffic Engineers (NAAE) have decried the absence of spare parts for equipment across the airports in the country.
Speaking at the 33rd NAAE day celebrations in Lagos, the National President of NAAE, Mr Ebenezer Makanjuola, explained that the lack of spareparts has negatively affected the performance of equipment in all the airports.
“Our greatest challenge today is spare parts, spare parts for our navigational equipment, communications equipment and we are facing this today because of the lacuna in the system, government is aware of it and they are doing something about it”, Makanjuola said.
Acknowledging that the equipment are aging, Makanjuola said there can never be a perfect system hence there were professional to attend to such equipment in times of need.
If there is no failure, there won’t be engineers. On December 14, 2014 at the UK airports the whole system failed and they called off all the flights. Nobody should premise what is happening on the engineers or equipment”, he said.
He urged the government to, as a matter of urgency, expedite action on the clearance of Aeronautical Information Service (AIS), equipment at the Lagos Wharf to allow for timely installation to enable the project take off the automation of AIS.
“AIS automation ought to have started long ago but due to bureaucracy in the system. We are appealing to government to expedite action on the AIS project” Makanjuola stated that there has never been any accident traceable to air engineers as a result of negligence in the past 25 years.
The NAAE president also disclosed that over 20 engineers would be retiring this year from NAMA but added that there was no cause for alarm as management has been training and retraining people to take over from the ageing professionals.
“The gap will not be felt and there will be no deficiency in the system as regards manpower development because NAMA has been training new set of people to take over from them”, he added.
He assured the flying public that the Nigerian airspace is safe and reliable and to ignore any negative statement about the airspace being pushed out to the public by some people in the system.