ANOTHER major disaster in the Nigerian aviation industry seemed imminent as a strange man climbed onto an Azman Airwing at the Ikeja Airport, Lagos on Friday, July 19, 2019.

MMA Lagos.

Passengers of the Port Harcourt-bound aircraft who spotted the intruder and caught him on video panicked as he reportedly threw a bag into one of the idling engines of the plane on the holding bay of the airport waiting for clearance to take-off.

Soon after the video went viral, a spokesperson of the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria, FAAN, Henrietta Yakubu, announced the immediate “indefinite suspension” of four principal unit heads of the Authority on duty pending investigations.

Indeed, it takes an advanced form of the negligence of duty for an unauthorised individual to gain access to the final waiting position for aircraft before take-off. It also takes a person who harbours a sinister agenda to be willing to take the risky venture that the culprit, identified as Usman Adamu (a Niger Republic national) undertook.

The fortunate thing was that no incident or accident took place as the passengers and the aircraft emerged from the ordeal safe and sound.

Security breaches happen in airports around the world, which is why security procedures are constantly being reviewed to ensure the safety of air travellers. Here in Nigeria, stowaways routinely find their ways into the holds of aircraft due to our poor security arrangements.

On November 30, 2016, the body of a dead stowaway was found on an Arik plane during its flight to Oliver Tambo International Airport, Johannesburg, South Africa. Earlier on July 7, 2015, a 15-year-old boy, Daniel Ricky Oikehna, sensationally smuggled himself into another Arik flight from Benin to Lagos Airport.

He was lucky to survive and became an instant media sensation.

These are just a few instances of the breaches which show how easy it is for people to gain access to sensitive parts of our airports and compromise the safety of travellers and airlines.

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We call for a comprehensive probe of this incident beyond whatever in-house efforts the FAAN is making. The National Assembly committees on Aviation should conduct a joint public hearing and an incisive appraisal of the security architecture in our airports to see what can be done to make them safer.

If the security of the Murtala Muhammed Airport in Lagos, which handled a total of 6.7 million out of the total of 15 million passengers in Nigeria in 2018 (making it the foremost international gateway into Nigeria) can be so easily breached by amateur intruders, it can only be imagined how vulnerable our provincial airports could be.

As our country faces increasing security threats from terrorists masquerading as Boko Haram Islamists, killer herdsmen and bandits, security must be tightened at our airports.

Let this be a wake-up call.

Vanguard