Bristow Helicopters Nigeria, is one of the world’s largest providers of helicopter services. The first civil helicopter company to work in the oil and gas industry, Bristow has earned an international reputation for speed of response and quality of service. In this chat with Aviation journalists recently, the Managing Director of the company, Capt Akin Oni, speaks on the safety conference being put together this week.

The safety conference ‘Fostering a Safety Culture’ is expected to bring people from the aviation, oil & gas companies, and government regulatory agencies to talk about safety.

Here is an excerpt on the interview by Jimoh Babatunde

On the cost of aircraft checks done by the company here in NigeriaI can’t give you the quantum value, but what I can give you is an idea of what we save by doing the checks locally.

While the aircraft is undergoing D-Check, if they have to fly the aircraft out of Nigeria, we will spend nothing less than $1.5 million. That is even low.

It is because we have partnership with our global companies in the UK. It will save us a lot. You can look at the hangar here and we have another one that we have invested $2 million that is part of the investment we are putting into Nigeria.
That hangar would allow us to have all our aircraft in there.

It is a substantial amount of money, even the smaller type of aircraft is serviced in the range of 800, 000 to a million dollars to take it out and that does not include the cost of importing it back to Nigeria and the duty.

We don’t have capability at the moment to service for other airlines. We do not have the manpower to be able to take on those additional works. We have the engineering capability as a management. We can only handle our own work.

On safety in its core area of operations

I suppose you mean the crisis in the Niger-Delta? I think the amnesty has worked. The oil companies have been very cooperative; we are not a military service.

Once there is possible trouble in the area, we don’t go there, so we work on the intelligence. The amnesty has worked. Before the amnesty, we were concerned because we need to fly at a very high level to avoid arms fire. As long as they tell us it is a hot area, we don’t go.

On his rating of the aviation agencies

It is difficult for me to rate them because the service level is different. We use facilities of Shell, Exxon Mobil. Shell tends to have their own facilities, so we don’t have to use their airports which other people will use to measure around. We have our own terminal here where we process passengers. There is infrastructure problem in Nigeria. The system has not grown.

We need to tell our government to improve infrastructure. The infrastructure is appalling. I can’t see how we can continue in this way. There is improvement in NAMA; there is no doubt about that. Particularly is the NCAA, they have been good, they have improved.

You have got category one? I am not so sure that the government has enough resources to bail the airlines out. I don’t think the government has enough resources. N200 billion will not be enough for one airline. The industry is capital- intensive. Honestly, I don’t see anything.

On training of personnel in the aviation sector
Looking at it this way, if for example the people who joined the company with me and who went into training, still in this orgainsation today, we will be over 90 per cent Nigerians, if over 90 people are trained by Bristol today, in the company, there is retention issue for us.

Also, the Human Resource (HR) market is mobile, most of our staffers are flying for Emirates, flying triple seven for Emirates today.

On our side, we have targets, and every time that I go back to the ministry to defend an expatriates quota position, the same applies to the engineering side, and I challenge the rest of the industry to do the same, join in the training of Nigerians, don’t poach.

We are training, but we can never address the aging issue that you mentioned. We will feel the impact in seven years, after seven years, it is what you benefit from that, but if only one or two companies are doing the training, you will end up with a situation where you have poaching.

How do you poach? You raise the salary, and in a situation like that, nobody wins. What I don’t see at the moment is that sense of responsibility for all these organisations to train Nigerians and I don’t think it is right.

A few organisations are doing it, so we need to be more aggressive. If you look at aviation today, the people who are in charge are very serious and they are getting to their retirement age, the problem we will face going forward is when these people leave and there will be that gap. Somebody needs to fill that gap, else we go backward.

On the upcoming seminar on safety in the industry
What we are hoping to achieve is to make sure that we maintain the policy culture in the aviation sector. Safety is our number one core value. In target zero, there are so many initiatives to ensure zero accident, zero comes to the environment, zero comes to the people.

There are insinuations that it is not possible not to have accidents, we believe it is possible, accidents don’t just happen, several things happen before you get to that terrible situation where you have to go and clean up blood; it is messy.

We cannot go into this saying that we can have many accidents, what we are interested in is zero-accident and that is what we are doing.

People see the soft issue, but it is the soft issue that makes the difference, so, we are not just talking about it, we are living it, day-to-day. If you look at our logo today, it is target zero. Everything we do is about that.

If others adopt that, and most of the organisations know that the accidents that we have today are human factors. We have improved on the system so much that before you have a failure, those things have been improved.

What we do now is to look after each other. For instance, if you are a co-pilot and the captain does anything wrong, we expect that co-pilot to tell the captain this is not right. It looks very difficult, how do you as a 19-year-old tell a captain of 50 years that he is wrong? He will tell him to shut up and tell him, what do you know?

But what we are saying and I’m very proud of it because the quality of Nigerians that we have today who joined our training process are the same people who will speak up and if you don’t respond to them, they will escalate it. We encourage them and give them money. Other organisations don’t do that. If you report a senior manager to me on safety issue, and I think you are right, we will put you on the boat.

We had a number three in the system and was found to climb an aircraft without his helmet. We recognised him and gave the person who reported him $150. That encourages safety. If the senior manager had fallen down from there and broke his skull, what is $150 to a family who are dependant on the man?

The idea is to develop a culture within the organisation that encourages you to speak up before something goes wrong. When you see something going wrong, speak up and don’t just walk away.
On relationship with labour

There is allegation that we sacked people and employed them as contract staff. It is not true. What we did was to look at the organisation after the loss of the Shell contract which was substantial which is why I said it was a painful divorce.

It was a contract that we had and the biggest contract we had for a long time and we lost that. We could keep everybody if we had not lost it but it depends on the organisation and we would not have survived it if we had kept everybody.

To me as a Nigerian, I know the consequences because I look after many people. It is rather painful and I look back at the situation. I know the pain.

We were very responsible about it. What we did was tell the engineers to say we will keep you, we offered to retain all pilots and engineers.