Sustaining Nigeria’s Airspace Safety

Recently joint Senate and House of Representatives Committees on Aviation inspected facilities of the Nigerian Airspace Management Agency in Lagos and other airports and brought to focus the critical role the agency plays in ensuring safety of flights in Nigeria. Chinedu Eze writes that to sustain the good record of safety in flight operations, government must fund the installation of needed landing aids for continued safety of the airspace

Air traffic management is an aviation term encompassing all systems that assist aircraft to depart from an aerodrome, transit airspace, and land at a destination aerodrome, including air traffic control, air traffic services, airspace management, and air traffic flow and capacity management. This is the major duty of the Nigerian Airspace Management Agency (NAMA) but significant input to make this happen is contributed by other aviation agencies, including the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA), the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN), the Nigeria Meteorological Agency (NIMET) and Accident Investigation Bureau Nigeria (AIB-N) as well as airlines.

But without landing aids, aircraft cannot take off and land, so landing aids is safety critical, just as Air Traffic Controllers. For traffic management to be efficient there must be effective communication, navigation and surveillance and these facilities ought to be provided and updated regularly.

In Nigeria, efficiency in airspace management is still debatable because, according to pilots, so much needs to be done to ensure effective ground to air, ground to ground and air to air communication. More equipment is needed to ensure that flights can land at all the airports in Nigeria at low visibility. So far, NAMA has sustained the airspace safety and recently when the Senate and House of Representatives Committee on Aviation conducted inspection of airport facilities at the Murtala MuhammedInternational Airport, Lagos, it created a platform for the agency to showcase what it has done, the challenge it is facing and the projects that are on going.
The acting Managing Director of NAMA, Matthew Pwajok who addressed the Senate and House members stunned them with his professionalism, as he reeled out the achievements and challenges of the agency.
Pwajok said NAMA provides key services that ensure efficient service of the airspace. It provides communication, navigation surveillance and search and rescue in case there is accident.

Search and Rescue
“We provide search and rescue in the event that any things goes wrong. NAMA in collaboration with NEMA (National Emergency Management Agency) and other key stakeholders provide search and rescue service. We need facilities for this critical service that we provide while we plan to ensure safety, anything could go wrong, it could be a natural situation, it could be system failure, it could be human error, and it could lead to an accident. It requires that we must have the capacity to be able to quickly identify the areas of accident and incidence and to be able to address it accordingly.

We are happy to hear that the AIB is having a drone that will help in the event of an accident. For us search and rescue is very strategic. We need mobility, vehicular movement to be able to access sites,” he said.
Pwajok said facilities for rescue should include the use of drones to be able to access areas that might be very remote.
“Like the AIB Commissioner said there are certain places you might not be able to access for investigation. For us to be able to discover areas for search and rescue, we might also need capabilities like drone to be able to access crash sites which might not be accessible easily and in some cases that could safe a whole lot of lives and property. So going forward we look forward to strengthen the search and rescue structure in NAMA by equipping it with personnel, facilities that would be able to enhance search and rescue in an effective and efficient manner,” the acting Managing Director of NAMA said.

Communication
In the area of communication, he said NAMA had a few challenges, noting that over time the airspace is increasing because of growth in traffic and the air routes are many and they cut across the nation because there are more connections between various airports, as new airports are coming up.
“So communication becomes a challenge where they were not envisaged or pre planned. In response to this, what we are doing is that we are deploying very high frequency system to enhance our extended coverage communication, from bandwidth to bandwidth to enhance safety of air navigation. That is the project that will enhance communication between pilots and air traffic controllers, which is voice communication and air to ground. We also have projects that are ongoing to provide capability for ground to ground collections or communication between air traffic control units.

“For exchange of flight, an aircraft departs you need to inform the airport where the aircraft is going for them to also prepare and expect the aircraft. All the necessary information needed to be passed. There are more digital means of sending this information, we call them data link, that is what we are also working on to get funding to be able to provide not just voice communication but also data links that can provide accurate and more express exchange of sensitive information and flight movements,” he said.
On navigation, Pwajok said NAMA has done reasonable well in terms of deployment because it has deployed instrument landing systems (ILS) with Category (Cat) 3 in Abuja and Lagos.

Install Cat 3 in Kano, Port Harcourt and Katsina
“We are also going to do additional Cat 3 this year. We have captured three more locations. Looking at severe weather conditions in certain areas, it is also necessary to have Cat 3 in such locations. We are also working very closely with our sister agency, FAAN, to ensure that the enabling environment in terms of light is also provided adequately for such categories for such location. But largely we have the Instrument Landing Systems (Cat 2) in most of our airport except a few. We have in Sokoto, Maiduguri, Jos, Yola, we have currently there is installation going on in Minna.

Installation has been done in Kano and Kaduna successfully. We also have installation going on in Akure. We have done Enugu when the runway was overhauled. In Benin we only have two, our plan is to be able to have for Calabar and Owerri. Ibadan also we have provision for it, Gombe already has from the state, Dutse has, Kebbi also has. Anambra has category 2; in fact, we are planning to do the calibration and in the next two weeks, we are planning to do a flight calibration, the system there are perfect, the lighting there are also Cat2. Bayelsa is also waiting to do a calibration on the instrument landing system Cat 2. So we are working hand in hand with them to do that,” Pwajok said.

The instrument landing system is a radio navigation system that provides short-range guidance to aircraft to allow them to approach a runway at night or in bad weather. In its original form, it allows an aircraft to approach until it is 200 feet over the ground, within half mile of the runway. It is rated in categories according to the sophistication of its function and utility, for example, there are ones that enable aircraft to land at zero visibility. So there are categories one, two, three to more advanced ones.

Navigation and surveillance
Pwajok said that in the area of navigation, the agency has done very well and that has helped the airspace to improve significantly.
“We have done very well in the area of navigation. We have deployed navigation equipment for 10 additional airports that are also coming up. We deployed Doppler, VOR (Very High Frequency Omni Directional Radio Range), it is a crucial system that guides aircraft navigation, the instrument landing system guides and brings you to the runway, provides you vertical guidance for landing. So it provides lateral and vertical guidance for landing. While the other one brings you to the airport, this one helps you to land. At the end, they complement each other and that is why they are deployed. We are expecting it this year for five airports with Doppler VOR, five airports for instrument landing system Cat 2. Again, we look towards installing Cat 3 in other airports that are critical,” the acting Managing Director said.

In the area of surveillance, Pwajok said it is just the radar system that NAMA has, noting that it strategically covers the whole of Nigeria and the agency has nine locations. Those nine locations include Lagos, Abuja, Kano, Port Harcourt, Talata Mafarwa, Maiduguri, Minna and then Ilorin. All of them have about 200 ILS installed in them.

“These radars are dependent on the aircraft being able to have equipment that we call an air borne system (corresponding installed equipment in the aircraft) for it to be detected. When the system fails, you have primaries in Abuja, Lagos, Port Harcourt, and Kano and they are within a 100 kilometers radius and can pick any aircraft or any target in flight whether it wants to be seen or not. So largely that is what we have on surveillance system. We are upgrading it to what we call a Top Sky Radar System and you have a lot more functionality, it is going to come with electronic means so that you don’t write the information manually. If you observed when we were there (inspected the radar facility), the air traffic controllers are writing on a script but with the upgrade of this it is going to be electronic. Everything from the discussion to writing is going to be electronic. That will save time and it will reduce workload and enhance accuracy and efficiency on the system,” he said.
Pwajok also disclosed that NAMA has a dedicated surveillance that it is doing under a programme called Wide Area Multi-lateration in the Niger Delta area for low-level flying helicopters.

“This project is expected to be completed, maybe, second quarter of this year. We have done the factory acceptance test and we have done the trainings, we have done the building where the system will be deployed in Port Harcourt. And it is going to monitor helicopters. We have had a few issues over helicopters with the intensity of helicopters also in that area is increasing. And then we had an addition with increased use of drone in that area for pipeline monitoring and environmental monitoring and also for oil field inspection.

“So you have a mixture of rotary wings, manned and unmanned aircraft, all in that axis. So the federal government in her wisdom granted the approval of buying that, so we have that project dedicated to that sector within the Niger Delta and we are very certain that by second quarter of this year that project should be operational and then add value by enhancing the operation, that is logistic support for the oil sector in that critical area in the Niger Delta. So it is a dedicated system, it has a capability to also pick drones or as we call it in aviation piloted aircraft or unmanned aircraft. Before now, the existing radar cannot pick the drones in that terrain but now we have a dedicated system,” Pwajok also said.

The Chairman of Senate Committee on Aviation, Senator Smart Adeyemisaid that there has been so much improvement in the aviation industry, especially in the area of airspace facilities and skilled personnel.
“We have listened to two heads of agencies and we are not in doubt that when you fly in Nigeria, you can get to where you are going. But I think more than ever before is the fact that we will continue to provide more funding for the aviation industry, especially in key areas such as the safety and the management of the airspace,” Senator Adeyemi said.