NAMA Finally Completes Decongestion Of Lagos Airspace

The Nigerian Airspace Management Agency says it has successfully split the Lagos Sub-Flight Information Region airspace into two sectors — Lagos West Area Control Centre on 120.9MHz radio frequency and Lagos East Area Control Centre on 127.3MHz frequency.

The agency said this was in line with its commitment towards enhancing the quality of air traffic services in the country, adding that sectorisation Lagos became imperative owing to the increasing volume of traffic and the attendant challenges posed to both pilots and air traffic controllers.

In a statement on Sunday, NAMA said that the sectorisation, which took off on July 18, was a culmination of a two-year strategic plan by the agency to achieve sectored operations in the Lagos sub-FIR, owing to the then congested single-radio frequency en-route control operations.

The Managing Director of NAMA, Capt. Fola Akinkuotu, was quoted as saying that although sectorisation of Lagos had eluded NAMA for over 16 years, it took the commitment and determination of members staff to see to its actualisation.

He said in a bid to achieve this feat, the agency had put in place several measures to ensure its effective take-off, adding that the measures included the development of standard operating procedures and a test-run of the procedures at the Nigerian College of Aviation Technology, Zaria; in-house training of needed manpower to boost capacity in the two sectors; enhancement of the required support facilities for ground-ground and air-ground communication.

He added that prior to the sectorisation, the agency had also updated the radar maps and database of the radar system; test run of the radar system and radio communication equipment, as well as the issuance of an Aeronautical Information Publication supplement May 9 to give airspace users 56 days notification as required by the International Civil Aviation Organisation and Part 14 of the Nigerian Civil Aviation Regulations.