THE Nigerian Meteorological Agency (NiMet) has announced that it will soon commission its upgraded pilot briefing rooms in Lagos and Abuja.
The Director-General of the agency, Professor Mansur Matazu, who dropped this hint to journalists in Lagos after receiving the ATQ magazines aviation impactful agency award of 2021, called on airlines to always encourage pilots and crew members to always approach the briefing rooms for proper updates
“Even though we provide some of these services via e-mail but in the briefing, they get to know details of what they should expect. At times for us in NIMET, we use that platform to get feedback because they are the ones that fly in the air and they can give us very useful feedback. In that, we do what we call forecast evaluation. They evaluate what is given to them, so we encourage them to always visit the briefing rooms of NiMet.”
He revealed that the agency was also deploying what it called runway visual range, an additional aid vision machine along the runway that can allow aircraft to land and take off even at what we call weather minimal level which is about 300 metres.
Matazu explained that the era of aircraft diversion as a result of poor visibility was over with the successful calibration of the Category 3 Instrument Landing System (ILS) in some major airports adding that the problem was a result of lack of calibration then.
“Actually, the main challenge at that time was the calibration of the CAT3 ILS which has been successfully done in all the major airports. So, with this, we don’t normally expect such. We work in harmony with all the aviation agencies and especially for NAMA, they directly consume our services.
“Even in JFK (New York), there could be such poor weather conditions that could make flight delays. So, we should expect that in the country, despite whatever instrumentation serviceability status that you have, there could be such level that it requires certain bad weather, especially in the atmosphere where you don’t have parking space”.
The Nimet boss explained that the dry season was associated with the influx of dust from Lake Chad and parts of Niger which normally comes with a strange wind impaired vision by truncating the clear vision.
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