Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) says is looking at a policy for developing general aviation with plans to unbundle the regulations and create regulations that would serve both big commercial airlines and general aviation business.
Speaking on the General Aviation situation, Director General of the NCAA, Captain Nuhu Musa said with the development of general aviation there would be an increase in manpower as well as creation of more employment for the droves of unemployed pilots and engineers in the labour market stressing that a successful aviation industry is built on general aviation.
According to him, separate regulations need to be made to accommodate large airliners and those who do crop dusting, or corporate charter cannot operate like those flying jumbo jets and these were areas that would be looked at for review.
He said, “Obviously when you talked about general aviation you touched something very close to my heart. General aviation is the basis for any successful aviation industry, go to anywhere in the world. For successful aviation industry General Aviation is key and it is the basis, general aviation provides the people, they provide experience, they provide experience personnel, they provide experience management staff, they provide experience engineers and when they go to big airlines it costs them less to train them because they have experience not direct from flying school.
On the promotion of a general aviation policy, he said that the civil aviation act is in front of the national assembly and would be passed soon hopefully to guide the organization towards its mandate.
He said “We are going to do a stakeholder meeting for the review of our regulations. We need to ‘de-clutter’ our regulations; we need to unburden our regulations. The general aviation has to be different from the commercial airlines, they are not the same risk and so we need to unbundle those regulations. General aviation could be charter flights, agric spraying, it could be small tourism aircraft maybe I have small money I buy a small plane and want to be flying about, air ambulance, there are so many areas of general aviation but right now regulations are bundled.
“Somebody flying corporate 12 people you are asking me for the same requirement as somebody flying a triple seven (777) to Dubai it doesn’t make sense, so when we unbundle those regulations it opens up the industry and what that does, all those excess pilots and excess engineers that don’t have jobs they will be absorbed, they will get experience and move on to the bigger airline industry and then those people.
“I don’t know what will finally happen when we review or regulations, it might give us more freedom, it might bring in more restrictions, I don’t know. So our regulations have to comply with our civil aviation act once that is done, we will review that. We don’t do it on our own, we will call stakeholders they will partake too, and we just don’t do this on our own,” said Musa.
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