By Sade Williams
Managing director, Nigerian Airspace Management Agency (NAMA), Engr. Tayib Mohammed Odunowo, has said that in the last four months when he took over the helms of affairs at the agency, his plan to transform the agency has been effective.
Speaking at an interactive forum with aviation correspondents on Friday in Lagos, Odunowo said he knew the agency had challenges like any other agency and had to quickly hit the ground running when he assumed office.
He said he began by starting a Business Process Re-engineering where he said there was need for a paradigm shift in the agency.
He disclosed that the first step was to initiate the process for automation for the agency.
‘’When I came into NAMA about four months ago, we did what we called Business process reengineering, almost changed direction, there is something called a paradigm shift, everybody sitting here can’t see things from different angle. Because I had the opportunity of coming from the NCAA, I had known some of the challenges, it was easy for me to just say what are the key issues, even in NCAA we had the same challenges. Some of the areas that we immediately jumped into was for me, the biggest one was automation. We needed to automate, the world is moving and leaving us behind. Nigeria is standing still in the area of automation. And if you look at the agencies, the ANS is the one that needs it most, it is NAMA’s lifeline. We talk about the NextGen, it is about Airspace modernisation which started in America. It is about moving from ground based to Satellite based ADS-B (Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast) even though, they are using GPS. Europe is doing the same, it is called Single European Sky, that is airspace modernisation, Dubai is doing Seamless Asia.
‘’It is all about air traffic management inter-cooperability. One single sky. So, everything we are doing in this field if you don’t want to be left behind, you must automate. Immediately, we started to deploy fibre in all our 46 stations, we brought in the Galaxy backbone, they have started as at today’’, he said.
In the area of Capacity building, the NAMA boss disclosed that there were issues but the agency is currently relying on Information Technology to boost staff training.
‘’In NAMA, we want to capitalise on IT. Three weeks ago, we were in Paris Airshow, I spoke to the DG CA about training and we learnt that 80 percent of the training they do in France is online. Therefore, we are changing that mindset now with my team and they have signed an agreement with us and they (staff) are going to start to join their virtual trainings and it’s cheaper for us.
‘’The other thing is that we are improving safety. There is something called air safety reports. It is about occurrences that God said it’s not time. Technically, these incidences have to be investigated just like an accident and litigating measures procured. We went all the way far back, started to go through all of them, and we constituted a committee, that process is ongoing and you will be amazed the result we are getting with that.’’, he added.
Odunowo, added that with synergy and teamwork, the agency has accomplished a lot.
‘’The other one is that in NAAMA, we now work as a team. Every week in NAMA, we have what we called non-technical meeting at 11 a.m. Every director chairs it. We have accomplished a lot with that synergy. We just started doing it, we were not doing it before in NAMA. We also do technical meetings with engineering and operations departments, if you see the issues that come up, you will be amazed. So, that synergy is forged heavily.
‘’Then the issue of communications of our upper airspace which is a growing concern. When we went to Norway, we came up with an analysis, even though we had the idea, we had the idea for like 30 years, but we needed solution. So, they are doing an analysis of our system, it’s like scan and they will come up with digital document. We have engaged two different companies on this.
Speaking on power issue and other projects, Odunowo lamented that it was affecting the agency’s revenue but disclosed that it would soon be a thing of the past.
‘’We have conducted a proper power audit for each station, power is killing us, we are bleeding and we need to do something about, it will soon be a problem of the past.
‘’NAMA has close to 20 projects ongoing right now and if we can deploy these projects, we are going to be the next best thing but the problem is we have funds challenge, so what we have done is we constituted a project review committee and the report is almost done, we are going be handing the interim report to the honourable Minister and the final report next week. We are reviewing and re-scoping the projects, some of them are obsolete, we need to take hard decisions, we can’t afford some, we could phase some out.
‘’We also created Controller Pilot Information sharing analysis Centre. That is a major one. A lot of pilots are on this platform. Our controllers are also there, so that when they are complaining real life, director of operations is also on the platform, this is real life, we get complaints and we log it and fix it and we come back. We are going to be having a yearly seminar, it is called the controller-pilots interactive forum. The clients are the pilots, they are the best people to get critique from, why not capitalise on it and take it seriously. We have over 70 pilots on that platform.’’, Odunowo added.
