Chibuike Amaechi, Nigeria’s Minister of Transportation, has commended the e-Flight clearance service of the nation’s airspace manager for improving efficiency in the aviation sector.
The e-flight clearance system powered by a web portal that is a joint initiative of the Nigerian Airspace Management Agency (NAMA) and the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA), eliminates strenuous system of manually processing aircraft over flight and landing permit by non-scheduled aircraft operators, according to the aviation authorities.
During the demonstration of the e-flight clearance module, the Aviation Minister says since the e-Flight Clearance can be processed online from anywhere in the world, without necessarily going to NAMA or NCAA offices, most aviation delays will be removed by the technology.
“What this software has done is that you can now manage your time better and make more money because time is money,” Amaechi adds.
According to the Minister, who led top officials of the Ministry to NCAA Annex Complex recently, as former Governor of Rivers State, he personally encountered challenges trying to process manual flight clearance, the same way other pilots and airline agents did.
Also in his remarks, Capt. Muhtar Usman, Director-General of NCAA, explains that the need to deploy technology in improving services necessitated innovation in the manner flight clearances are now conducted.
According to him, the electronic clearance will be able to identify all incoming flights and record them in real-time using their tail numbers as well as recording the time they depart the Nigerian airspace.
”The need to transit from the manual process of processing flight clearance to electronic became imperative following the myriad of challenges that dogged the old system. These included difficulty in tracing documents, unnecessary bureaucracy leading to waste of time as well as vulnerability of the system to manipulation to the detriment of national security”.
”It was therefore in a bid to mitigate or completely eradicate the above challenges that Nigerian Airspace Management Agency (NAMA), in collaboration with the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) in 2014 commenced the process of developing the web-based software application as an alternative to the manual system”, Usman adds.
On his part, Patrick Nebe, Deputy General Manager, NAMA Clearance Office adds that, ”the e-Flight Clearance solution is a complete online real time business application which would among others ensure proper documentation of requests, eradicate violation of Air Operator Certificate (AOC) provisions by aircraft operators, track local aerodrome movement of aircraft, track location of any aircraft in the country as well as generate local and international bills for each operation.”
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