TO put an end to incidents of the sale of adulterated aviation fuel threatening flight safety in the country, the Federal Government has been urged to compel oil marketers to set up a testing laboratory for aviation fuel.
This is just as pilots have been advised to carry out fuel contamination checks before the product is dispensed to the tank of aircraft.
Speaking on the cases of adulterated aviation fuel the aviation sector has recorded, a member of the Aviation Round Table (ART), Group Captain John Ojikutu (retd.), challenged the government to provide testing laboratories for marketers where they must be made to conduct mandatory tests on the products before supplying to airlines if the government cannot repair the pipelines that supply fuel to airports.
He noted that the recommendation for the construction of testing laboratory was in the safety recommendations issued by the then Accident Investigation Bureau (AIB) now Nigerian Safety Investigation Bureau (NSIB) in 2012, but regretted that 11 years after, the recommendation was yet to be implemented.
Ojikutu added that the testing laboratory should be approved by the Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR), the regulatory agency in the oil and gas sector.
He used the opportunity to call for the repairs of hydrants at the aprons of some of the airports to enable the pumping of the commodity directly from the facility into the aircraft.
This, Ojikutu said, would not only eliminate tankers from entering the airports, but reduce accidents during the discharge of the Jet A1 fuel by trucks.
“This too will reduce the number of vehicles and their incessant collisions on the aprons. The options for doing these are for either marketers alone or in partnership with the airlines or give the repairs of the pipelines and hydrants out as Build Operate and Transfer (BOT) concession for about 10 years,” he added.
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