Government develops policy to check menace of wildlife on air safety

Government develops policy to check menace of wildlife on air safety

The Nigerian government says it has developed a policy on wildlife hazard management to check the menace of bird strike to air safety at the nation’s airports.

The Permanent Secretary, Federal Ministry of Aviation, Ms Anne Ene-Ita, said this in Lagos on Monday at the Africa Wildlife Management Workshop held at the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) Training School, Lagos.

Managing wildlife hazard

Ene-Ita noted that the policy thrust would recognise the hazards posed by bird and wildlife to airport operations and put in place measures to alleviate them.

She said that the NCAA had developed and approved a manual on bird and wildlife hazard management at the airports.

According to her, the manual contained the legal framework and airport order in line with the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) standards.

Increasing cost of operation

She disclosed that airlines worldwide lost about 180 billion Naira (1.2 billion dollars) annually to the wildlife threat while local carriers recorded losses from bird strike alone in excess of 1.5 billion Naira (10 million dollars) in the past 12 months.

Ene-Ita explained that bird strike, which has added to the operating cost of the airlines, remained a natural phenomenon and not peculiar to West Africa.

“It is continually affecting the industry worldwide,” she said.

She noted that airlines operating within the US had annual loss of 400 million dollars.

She said “the menace of bird strike resulted in a collision of a US airliner with a flock of birds, causing the Airbus 320 aircraft to lose power and ditch in the Hudson River just after take-off.

“The situation in Nigeria and other West African countries is even more worrisome due to the frequency of such incidents in view of the attraction of different species of wildlife to the airports caused by high bushes and waste spots within and around the airport environments.

“One of the domestic airlines recently recorded a loss of about 270 million Naira to a bird strike on one of its planes.

“The Airline Operators of Nigeria threatened to take the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria to court to compel it to pay for costs incurred in repairing damaged aircraft as a result of wildlife incidents,’’ she said.

The Director-General of NCAA, Dr Harold Demuren, noted that among the several dimensions of the bird strike menace were safety and cost to the airlines.

Demuren said that the airlines were working hard to reduce operational cost and the damage occasioned by bird strikes, adding that the continent’s skies were prone to bird strike and thereby needed special attention.

According to him, no fewer than 155 bird strike incidents were recorded in Nigeria between January 2009 and June 2011.

There were 70 reported cases in 2009, 53 in 2010 while so far in 2011, there were 22 reported cases.

Participants at the workshop were drawn from Nigeria, Cameroun, Gambia, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Mali and Uganda, among others.

NAN/Williams