The National Airtraffic Communicators Association of Nigeria (NACAN) has called on the authorities of the Nigerian Airspace Management Agency (NAMA) to provide state-of-the-art equipment in its departments across the country to enable it carry out its functions effectively.
The President of NACAN, Mr George Nkambo who declared this to journalists in his office in Lagos while highlighting the activities of the association’s coming 25th AGM in Abuja noted, lamented how lack of equipment had negatively affected the performance of the air traffic Communicators unit.
He described as frustrating the poor state of equipment saying: “When you come to work, you see the backlog of messages that ought to have been transmitted and not transmitted. It allows people to think other things, it gives room for laxity as if they are not ready to work”
According to Nkambo, the lack of adequate equipment had made it difficult for them to daily follow the procedures recorded on log books.
The NACAN president who also decried the shortage of manpower in the department urged the Management of NAMA to look at their case as a peculiar one as they needed additional 300 personnel to join the 176 on ground to cover all the airports across the country effectively, saying communicators were the least in the directorate of operations.
He listed five airports in Jalingo, Bayelsa, Bauchi, Kebbi and Jigawa as those yet to be covered by Communicators operations adding that most of these airports were involved In Hajj operations.
Nkambo revealed how through the intervention of NCAA, few members of NACAN had been drafted to Bayelsa airport stressing that Lagos has limited numbers of Communicators.
Emphasising that with the equipment coming in and with only two persons on a shift that it will be difficult to cover their functions at terminal to receive data from the Kano and Abuja Abuja stations, Nkambo declared: “We have e-flight plans messages coming from airlines, Lagos we have a heap of flight between 11 and 12 midnight. All scheduled flights turn in their plans for transmission and you require people to do that, people work more than six hours it is detrimental to health.”
In a related development, the general secretary of NACAN Kayode Famuro, explained that the present executives were able to address myriad of problems that retarded the progress of the association.
Famuro while noting that the Managing Director of the agency, Captain Fola Akinkoutu had stabilized NAMA in providing enabling environment and trainings for smooth operations, advised all members of NACAN to always cooperate with the Management team of NAMA and the communications department.
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