Nigeria’s domestic airline, Air Peace has indicated plans to downsize once flight operations resume.
The Chairman of the airline, Mr Allen Onyema who declared this during a webinar organised by Aelex partners with the theme: “Survival Strategies for Nigerian Airlines’, said the downsize will affect some of his workers even as he added that henceforth, that the airline will no longer provide inflight services on its local flights.
The Air Peace chief said. The decision will be taken to cut cost due to the negative effect of the COVID-19 pandemic.
While hinting that some workers may be asked to stay home until the situation normalises, Onyema predicted that on the resumption of flights that there will be low patronage due to fear passengers may entertain regarding air travels, hence, a lot needs to be done to build confidence in the travelling public once again.
According to the airline Chief, some aircraft in the fleet of the airline will be deployed with a reduction in the number of flights on resumption just as he added: “Out of our 13 Boeing 737 planes, we are only going to deploy four of them out, out of our eight ERJ aircraft, we are going to deploy only six because those ones are. Just 50 seater, so we will manage with those ones.
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“From 100 flights per day, Air Peace is going down to 42 flights, so going to Abuja will no longer be every hour, doing downsizing of our operations is good in cutting cost, so we are downsizing our operations to almost about 60%, we are going to do about 40% of our operations and even in that 40%, we are not going to carry 40% of the passengers we used to carry before.
“Passengers figures are not going to be the same again like what it used to be years back, everything has changed, so going into operations, a new set of regulations will emerge.”
While explaining that with the reduction of flights that few number staff will be required for operations, Onyema, however, declared that Air Peace was not sacking any staff as it will bring back more staff when flight increases.
He urged staff that will be affected by the decision to see it as a sacrifice for the stability of airline business saying one cannot pretend to carry every staff at the same time only to go down permanently and forever with no hope of survival again.
On the decision to stop inflight services onboard, Onyema said the era of serving food, snacks, drinks were gone as it had been stopped in other climes.
He advised Nigerian airlines that intend to stay in the business to copy this style at this critical period and see it as a time not to engage in a competition of winning over customers with foods.
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