THE Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) has concluded plans to review upward the validity period of Air Operator’s Certificate (AOC) renewal for scheduled and unscheduled operators as from the first quarter of 2023.
Hinting this at a virtual interactive session with aviation journalists in Lagos, the Director-General of NCAA, Captain Musa Nuhu, said that the two years’ validity period when AOCs for airlines were reissued, for scheduled operators has now been upgraded to five years while the one for the unscheduled airlines will be three years starting from 2023.
He said, “We are working on the review of the current validity. Within the first or early part of the first quarter of 2023, it will come into effect and it will explain who is entitled. As soon as it is internally done, we will release the new review.
“We have listened to the industry over the years; we are not averse to improvement or changes. We are in the process of reviewing the re-validity of the AOC issued to the industry. For scheduled operators, we extend from two years to five years, then unscheduled operators, those are the charters we are looking to extend to three years so that we can accommodate the concerns of the industry.
“It automatically extends re-validity to five years for scheduled and three for unscheduled. Of course, there are other changes and conditions. A fee for AOC now is N200,000; that is just a return ticket from Kano to Abuja and countries like Ghana pay $250,000. The effort the authority puts in the process from the preliminary to phase 2, phase 3,4 and 5 is a lot that if you quantify it in financial terms, it is a lot. So we are going to look at that.”
He challenged all stakeholders to contribute to the development of the country’s new Civil Aviation Policy.
The new Civil Aviation Act 2022 offers an opportunity to the entire industry to make their input to develop a new civil aviation policy that would guide the regulation of the industry.
The DG noted that as critical as the new aviation policy is to the sector, many key players expected to make contributions towards the end result to the general being of the sector have been found wanting. He lamented how the key players failed to respond to the notice the authority sent out to them to make inputs towards the review of the 2013 national Civil Aviation Policy.
“To be honest, we have sent an AOL with the old policy, I think only one or two airlines have bothered to make an input to this and yet we keep complaining that there are issues and people are not being carried along.
“When the Ministry collates them, puts them into a document, there will be a stakeholders’ conference to look and review and make necessary inputs to the document and adopt the document which will seek the Federal Executive Council (FEC) approval and becomes legally binding on everybody but we all need to play our part and to be honest, the response from the industry is extremely poor.
“We complain, this is not working, that is not working but people have been given an opportunity. Very few people have made contributions, surprisingly people outside the industry have made significant contributions more than the people in the industry and we say it is our industry and we are not making any effort to make an input so that we ensure that we have an industry that we will all be proud of.”
He used the opportunity to talk on the ongoing efforts being made by the government to resolve the issue of the foreign airlines’ trapped funds in the country saying, “The issue with blocked fund is strictly the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) matter and I can authoritatively tell you that the Minister of Aviation, Senator Hadi Sirika, is working seriously with the Ministry of Finance, the Central Bank of Nigeria Governor and all parties involved to get it sorted out.”
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