MEDVIEW Airline in the early hours of Thursday airlifted 320 Lagos State Pilgrims to Mecca from the Murtala Muhammed International Airport, Lagos aboard the newly acquired B777-200ER aircraft.
The B777-200ER departed the Hajj/cargo terminal of the international airport with the pilgrims as early as 7 am.
The pilgrims who arrived and started boarding as early as 5:30 am were done with the boarding formalities by 6:00 am before the flight took off at 7 am.
The airline which is scheduled to airlift no fewer than 2,001 passengers from Lagos State alone, has a total of 10,000 pilgrims of the 95,0000 pilgrims to airlift from four states in Nigeria ant two neighbouring countries.
Apart from Lagos pilgrims, the airline will also be airlifting pilgrims from Kaduna, Maiduguri, Ilorin as well as pilgrims from Guinea Bissau and Niger according to the airline management.
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Speaking to journalists before the take-off of the flight at the airport, the Executive Director, Business Development in the airline, Alhaji Isiaq Na’allah said that Med-view will be airlifting its pilgrims on seven trips.
His words: “We give praise to the Almighty Allah for giving us the strength to start our airlift, this is the first flight we are doing this year and we are hoping to airlift about 10,000 pilgrims. We are airlifting our pilgrims from Lagos, Kaduna, Maiduguri and Ilorin.
“Obviously, it’s challenging if you look at the number of passengers we use to carry in such a short period, it is challenging and so you need a very high capacity aircraft, this is why we have brought this aircraft, it’s a triple seven (777) and it’s a modern aircraft.
“This flight carries 323 capacity. Right now, the Lagos people that are going now are 320. From Lagos state, we have about 2000 passengers and we are going to do about 7flights for them.”
Speaking on consistency, Na’Allah added: “The major source of our consistency is our ability to provide the desired services for our passengers, we give them the comfort when they are going and when they are coming back and also when they are there as much as possible we make sure they enjoy their stay.”
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