Flight resumption: Air Peace flies all aircraft to demonstrate readiness

The Air Peace airline, on Wednesday, June 24, in a show of strength and readiness to resume operations, traversed the Nigerian airspace with several of its fleet of aircraft in what it termed ‘shakedown’ flights.

The airline has a mixed fleet of 25 aircraft which includes three wide-body aircraft, the Boeing 777s.

In preparation for the recommencement of flight operations, all the aircraft belonging to the airline on Wednesday took to the skies flying to Abuja, Port Harcourt and back to Lagos without passengers.

These flights were aimed at ensuring that the aircraft is in tip-top condition, having been grounded for close to three months though they have been under very strict storage maintenance.

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The Spokesperson of the airline, Stanley Olisa, who revealed this in a statement to journalists, said the shakedown flights are part of the measures the airline has developed to guarantee the safety of both passengers and crew when operations resume.

He noted that the aircraft has been in storage mode for a couple of months and extensive maintenance checks have been carried out to keep them up to the required standards.

According to Olisa: “Within this period of flight ban, we have ramped up technical maintenance of all our aircraft, scaled up cabin refresh and carried out thorough disinfection to ensure they remain fit for the skies when the authorities flag off operations”.

He added that the aircraft is now being brought out of storage and the pilots have been testing them, stressing that all pilots and flight attendants have been retrained in line with NCAA directives.

On the airline’s readiness to resume regular flights, Olisa declared: “As you know, we have been operating ‘special flights’ to local and international destinations, and we have more of such flights in the works. This accentuates our preparedness for operation restart as our pilots, cabin crew and engineers have been hands-on and are very current. So, we are a hundred per cent ready to resume”.

Air Peace has been operating charter and evacuation flights to various international destinations even as the flight ban persists.

In April, the airline had helped to deliver Federal Government’s medical supplies from Turkey and China to fight the COVID-19 pandemic while it has also operated several evacuation flights to India, Israel and China in the last two months.

NIGERIAN TRIBUNE