Capt. Dapo Olumide, the Acting Managing Director (AMD) of Nigeria Air, has explained why an aircraft was chartered from Ethiopian Airlines for the unveiling of Nigerian Air with a Nigerian logo.
Recall that Ethiopian Airlines’ ownership of the Boeing 737-800 series aircraft flown into Abuja from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, on May 26 made headlines shortly after Nigeria Air’s unveiling ceremony.
The plane took off from Addis Abeba, Ethiopia, at 9:55 a.m. on May 26 and landed at Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport in Abuja at 12:43 p.m.
Hadi Sirika, the Minister of Aviation, expressed delight that the project had finally taken off after “a very long, tedious, daunting, and difficult path.”
The Nigerian Air was later unveiled with the registration ET-APL at the Abuja airport’s General Aviation Terminal. Nigerians, on the other hand, had mixed feelings about the development.
Subsequent investigations revealed that the plane flew for its original airline for four days before being brought to Nigeria.
It was discovered that it was on its way from Addis Ababa to Tel Aviv, Israel.
Flightradar, a popular flight tracking website, revealed that the aircraft was still flying between Tel Aviv and Mogadishu, Somalia, on May 21, 2023. On the 20th of May, it served both Mogadishu in Somalia and Beirut, Lebanon’s capital, while the previous day it also served Beirut.
My Mandate Was To Secure an Operating Certificate Not Necessarily To Operate It
Olumide explained to the Senate Committee on Aviation on Tuesday that Nigeria Air had yet to secure an operating license for full flight operations, claiming that the processes were still in the early stages.
According to him, the aircraft was used until the necessary processes for the airline’s operation were completed. He stated that his mandate was to obtain an air operating certificate for the airline, not to operate it, but to obtain a license to fly.
The aircraft that came in and left was a legitimate charter flight. Anyone of us here if we have a destination wedding in Senegal, we can charter an aircraft.
You don’t need to have a licence to do that, you just charter an aircraft, an aircraft you paid for it, it will be brought here, take your passengers and off you go.
And that is what we did. But in this case, it was to unveil the logo of Nigeria Air. Ever since 2018, all you have ever seen about Nigeria Air were pictures, drawings not the real aircraft, and we thought it was time to show what the real aircraft will look like also to let shareholders see. We have institutional investors, they are not in aviation but they are putting their money for 10 to 15 years, so they need to see what the actual aircraft will look like.
So we brought it in here to show them what the aircraft will look like, then the social media dimension came into it.
For us to get that licence which is my mandate, we must among other things have three aircraft before the NCAA will give us a licence and those three aircraft must be Nigerian registered aircraft, Olumide noted.
He added:
So when this aircraft came on a chartered flight, everybody said we have launched Nigeria Air; there are learned people in the aviation industry who could have countered that when social media came out, but they chose not to.
Earlier, the Chairman of the Committee, Sen. Biodun Olujimi, said it was unfortunate that the former Minister of Aviation failed to involve the committee and other stakeholders in the Air Nigeria project.
To state the obvious, he failed to carry members of the Committee along in virtually all ramifications despite the degree of respect members accorded him any time he was invited for meetings, he said.