Air safety: NAMA spends N2 billion on manpower training in 2018

The Nigerian Airspace Management Agency (NAMA) has announced an expenditure of N2billion on manpower training in the last one year 2018.

Speaking during a courtesy visit to his headquarters recently, the managing Director of NAMA, Capt. Fola Akinkuotu, said that the management brought new equipment to enhance the training for engineers to improve their basic skills.

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In his words, he said “Last year, we spent nothing less than close to N2billion on training. We have done training for engineers in improving basic skills. We spend money on what are considered as recurrent training.

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“When we bought new equipment, we provided new training on this equipment. We’ve done a lot of training for air traffic controllers. We sent them overseas just as we did for the engineers. They went to Cairo. They went to the States and they had courses in developing airspace planning in managing airspace

“We have not just taken the technical aspects because this is a technical institution – air traffic controllers and engineers. We have upgraded their training a lot. We have trained accountants. We’ve done for auditors; all our Staff. I’ve had local training which we conducted in CMD also in Badagry.

Akinkuotu speaking on his assessment of air fatality and safety said that, “Nigeria is pretty safe, we don’t have any fatality in 2018, well there was ground accident but no fatality.

“Accident, yes, but fatality, no and the issue is that we have continue to manifest for the past six years and improvement on our safety record, it is there base on statistics, base on evidence.

“How you manage every situation determines. You can be driving on the main road and the car might have a brake failure, you can control it and that does not mean someone is hurt. Yes, the car can be damaged, but there is no fatality.

“There is no machine base system that will not have issues but great effort has been made by all the stakeholders to ensure safety” he added

Adding that “Nigerian Airspace Management Agency has been better, is not that I stated bringing new things but I took from where I meet and today tremendous improvement in training, building human capacity, equipments, facilities and even technology.