This is very proactive Nigeria, We've have one-too-many plane crashes. This is a welcome move. Read the full article culled from Business Day.
As Reported
Nigeria has become the first country in the world to take a big pro-active safety initiative by mandating domestic airline operators to equip their aircraft with a new technology, the Automated Flight Information Reporting System (AFIRS). This move is aimed at aiding accident investigation, search and rescue, as well as ending speculation in the event of an air crash.
Currently, only international airlines use the equipment to monitor their aircraft movements globally.
The AFIRS is a revolutionary new technology which combines on-board logic and processing on the aircraft with ground-based servers which interpret and route messages from the aircraft to parties on the ground, who need to know, such as the airline operation centres and regulators.
When an event is detected and triggered, not only is an alert sent from the aircraft to the designated parties, but the facility also starts to stream black-box, Flight Data Recorder (FDR) data of the aircraft in real-time, to ground-based servers.
Harold Demuren, director-general of the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) said the decision to mandate such equipment for airlines, and have them aboard aircraft in Nigeria, came because the industry had suffered setbacks following speculations about the cause of air accidents or incidents.
He said rather than send wrong signals to the international community in such instances, the equipment can easily capture whatever transpired during a flight, whether with the crew or the aircraft, and that this information can be released to the public who yearn to know the cause of the accident.
“For instance, if I had known from the second day, the cause of the Dana crash, things would have been clear. But because we did not know, everybody started to speculate. I told them then that aviation safety is data driven.
“Nigeria will be the first country to make it mandatory for domestic operations, it is a big safety step, the equipment shows the way the aircraft moves, how the pilot engages the breaks, or how he landed. It picks all the data that is going into flight data recorder and directly transmits them down to the ground, while the aircraft is airborne, without the pilot’s input. So if there was high temperature, it would transmit it down. If there are exigencies, it transmits everything down”, he said.
The equipment which costs $50,000 each (N7.9million) will cost at least 11 airlines over $550,000 (N86.9 million) to purchase , apart from the costs of installing.
Speaking on the initiative, Dele Ore, a renowned Nigerian pilot commended the move, saying “we will no longer have an accident that we do not know the cause of.
“Although the challenge is for the airlines to cough up money to get the equipment, this is a matter of safety. It will aid accident investigation, prevention and search and rescue. The era of Flight Data Recorder/Black Box (FDR) getting burnt at crash sites will be over”, he said.
Also speaking, John Ojikutu, former airport commandant and an air traffic controller, said for once Nigeria is taking a pro-active step at improving safety of flights and passengers, adding that the NCAA should also make it mandatory for airlines to immediately download adverse reports to it and the Accident Investigation Bureau (AIB) for more efficiency.
“For an accident to happen, there must have been a chain problem, it is not just a day’s problem, there is no reason why the airlines should not buy it, because the system will let you know what has gone wrong with everything that has to do with a particular flight. The crew can no longer misbehave either deliberately or unconsciously ”, he said.
Demuren explained that when the Dana Air accident occurred, people wanted to know the cause. He added that if they had known the true cause of the accident, the issue would not have been embarrassing to global aviation bodies.
The accident, he said led the agency to the AFIRS, adding, “that is what we have planned to do with all Nigerian aircraft. As I am speaking with you, Aero Contractors has it on their aeroplanes, Arik need to do certain things to subscribe to Boeing for the programme”.
The animation feature in the equipment, he said, can also be used to reconstruct or simulate a flight scenario, which can be used for investigative purposes by addressing the immediate challenge of locating and decoding black boxes.
He added that Airbus has indicated that by 2015, it will start installing the facility in all its aircraft from the manufacturing plant, to avoid the problem of installation by airlines.
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