Leadership (Abuja)
4 January 2009
The federal government has announced that it would commence the shutting down of all ticket sales offices of all operating foreign airlines in the country this new year to save the travel agency business in the country.
The director-general of Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA), Dr. Harold Demuren,who announced this said government's decision to close down the ticket sales offices was to make it possible for the travel agents to create more jobs for Nigerians.
At a briefing in Lagos penultimate week, he said : " We are going to close down the ticket sales offices of all the foreign airlines in the country to restore the travel agencies' business. This government has job creation as one of its major priorities.
"Therefore, if these sales offices are closed, the travel agencies will be able to create more jobs for Nigerians."
Commenting on the new GPS satellite-based flight tracking system, Demuren said NCAA had completed work on it and would deploy the system in this year.
He said as soon as the system was deployed, the NCAA would encourage all the local airlines in the country to adopt it in their fleet of aircraft.
According to him , if had such a system had been in place ,Nigeria would not have been confronted with the embarrassment it faced during the case of the missing Beechcraft 1900D .He said the flight tracking system, would make it possible for the aviation authorities and airlines to know the whereabouts of their aircraft at any given point in time.
"It was difficult to tell where the missing Beechcraft was because, from what we saw of the wreckage of the plane, the impact of the crash destroyed the Emergency Locator Transmitter (ELT), hence it could not transmit any signal to give an indication of the whereabout of the plane.
"But with the flight tracking system, aircraft in flight can be tracked as they fly along and it becomes possible to track them whenever anything happens to them. We have completed the system; we will adopt it and also encourage the airlines to adopt it," He said.
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