>
The proposed resumption of domestic flights scheduled for June 21 in the country may not be feasible, according to the Nigeria Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA).
The NCAA Director-General, Captain Nuhu Musa, disclosed this during the daily briefing of the Presidential Task Force on COVID-19, on Thursday.
Musa stated that NCAA will not approve resumption of flight operations until it gets confirmation that operations can be carried out in a safe and organised environment.
“We never said aviation is going to start definitely on the 21st. We were supposed to put a report back based on what we have and we have some work to do. As such, June 21 is not a feasible date to resume operations.”
While maintaing that there is a lot of work to be done before operations can resume in the aviation sector, Musa said: “Prior to this mandate from the presidential task force, the regulatory body, NCAA had developed advisory circulars distributed to the different sectors of the industry.
“These circulars required all sectors of industry to present a restart plan to the regulatory body for approval. A lot of service providers have provided their restart plans and these restart plans are to be reviewed by the civil aviation authority.
“When we review those documents, if we are happy with those documents, then we will go to each individual organisation to verify what they have given as their restart plan. Some provided inadequate documents and their documents were sent back to them.
“Significant progress has been made, but there is still a lot of work to be done. The aviation system is a very complex system and this system has been compounded with the public healthcare concept which a lot of them, the aviation system is not used to implementing.”