Director General of Nigerian Meteorological Agency (NiMet), Prof Mansur Matazu has said the agency is deploying a runway visual range, an additional aid vision machine along the runway that can allow aircraft to land and takeoff at weather minimal level which is about 300 meters.
This is just as he said NiMET has upgraded its pilot briefing rooms in Lagos and Abuja and they will soon be commissioned and has urged airlines, pilots and crew to always approach the briefing rooms for proper updates
Prof Matazu disclosed this to newsmen at the Murtala Muhammed international Airport Ikeja over the weekend after receiving aviation’s impactful agency award of 2021, said that the era of aircraft diversion as a result of of poor visibility was over with the successful calibration of the CAT 3 ILS in some major airports adding that the problem then was as a result of lack of calibration.
He said, “Actually, the main challenge that time(Visibility issues which caused diversions) was the calibration of the CAT3 ILS which has been successfully done in all the major airports. So, with this, we don’t normally expect such. We work in harmony with all the aviation agencies and specially for NAMA, they directly consume our services”
“Even in JFK (New York) they could be such poor weather conditions that could make flight delays. So, we should expect that in the country, so that they would despite whatever instrumentation serviceability status that you have, they could be such level that it requires certain bad weather. Especially you know that in the atmosphere where you don’t have parking space”
Speaking on the harmattan haze, the Nimet boss explained that the dry season was associated with influx of dust from the Lake Chad and parts of Niger which normally comes with a strange wind impaired vision by truncating the clear vision.
Matazu explained that principally in aviation it caused visibility issues with horizontal visibility on the threshold that required for smooth landing and takeoff.
“so, this season is associated with poor visibility. And when the visibility is so poor that you cannot have a clear horizontal vision and some airports will have delays takeoffs and landing of aircraft and sometimes extending to the night time when they can use the lighting of the runway”
He urged airlines, pilots and crew to always approach the briefing rooms for proper updates
“Even though we provide some of these services via e-mail but in the briefing, they get to know details of what they should expect, at times for us in NIMET we use that platform to get feedback because they are the ones that fly in the air and they can give us a very useful feedback”
“In that, we do what we call forecast evaluation. They evaluate what is given to them, so we encourage them to always visit the briefing rooms of NiMet”
Source: nigerianflightdeck.com