The Nigeria Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) has cleared Aero Contractors airline to resume schedule flight operations.
This was made known by the Director General of NCAA, Capt Musa Nunu during an interview with Aviation journalists on the planned return of the airline to operations.
“They are fine. As far as we are concerned, they can resume operations,” NCAA said.
Nuhu affirmed that the airline was not grounded because of an critical safety issue but on its financial wellbeing which he agreed could jeopardize safety.
“Aero contractors was not grounded based on safety issues, we did an audit of them because whatever audit you do, you have findings and they were all minor findings. There was no Level 1, 2, 3 findings. They were very insignificant. We notified them. We audited them and we found out that the issue they had was finance sustainability,”
He explained that an audit was carried out on the airline and nothing significant enough to threaten safety was detected in the operations of the airline.
“Aviation is safety sensitive and whenever you have financial difficulty, it is just a matter of time, you will not be able to comply with all the regulatory requirements and some may start cutting corners. So, before financial issue becomes safety issue, we had a discussion with them and they on their own before we took any action, agreed with our findings and suspended their operations to enable them reorganise and get some funding to get more equipment. That is what they have done,” tthe NCAA CEO explained.
He added that afte4 agreeing with the report of the audit, the management of airline voluntarily suspended its schedule operations without waiting for NCAA to take action; agreed and entered into a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with NCAA on how the financial issues would be addressed without compromising safety.
“We sat with them, they submitted, we asked for projection, which they did, we reviewed. The first one wasn’t good enough, they had to go and review it and it was quite satisfactory. We had MoU with them for payment of outstanding 5 per cent on Ticket Sales Charge (TSC),” he explained.
