•We’ll add our three brand new Dreamliners to our three 777s and treat Nigerians to what they have not seen before

•Draws Tinubu’s attention to how foreign airlines are fleecing Nigeria, commends Keyamo, speaks on rebate tickets for students

By Dickson Omobola

Allen Onyeama, the chairman of Air Peace, in this interview opens up on the frustrations his airline faced before their London route was approved and vows that their daily flights to London, billed to flag off later this month, will be special. With economy class going for N1,200,000 Onyeama believes it will be the cheapest and the best for passengers. Approving discount for Nigerian students to be able to return home every holiday delights him. He is excited that travel agencies are promoting his air line with a slogan, ‘Air Peace, Our Own’, but he, at the same time, frowns at how foreign airlines are aided in Nigeria to fleece the country and hopes the government of Bola Ahmed Tinubu does something about it. Excerpts:

In the past you said it’s Heathrow, London or nothing. However, you are now going to Gatwick, London. What happened?

I said so in the past. I said it was either Heathrow, London or nothing because the bilateral aviation safety agreement, BASA, we signed with the United Kingdom, UK, is this: You give me your primary airport, we give you ours. British Airways, Virgin Atlantic, both of them come into my country (Nigeria) using our primary airports – Lagos and Abuja. When we applied, they told us Heathrow was not available to us.

They even suggested Stansted or Luton airports, which I found very insulting. They also suggested Gatwick, but I refused because I wanted to go to Heathrow, their primary airport. After some time, I saw that they wanted to frustrate us. So, I said let us go anywhere even if they wanted us to go to Scotland. We decided to take Gatwick, which was not really our choice. In the long run, we saw some good in it. Most of our people are down the Southeastern part of London. At the same time, when you look at the traffic situation in Heathrow to the centre of London, it is very excruciating, but from Gatwick, they allotted the Southern Terminal to Air Peace. And when you get to the Southern Terminal, you get out of immigration, take your luggage and you get into the Gatwick express train within three minutes, which will take you to Victoria right into central London. There, you have access to tube, national rail and road transport. Gatwick has turned out to be even better at the end of the day for us. That is why we took Gatwick.

Can you tell us more about Gatwick, particularly the schedules? Given that Lagos to London flights are not totally new, what will Air Peace do differently from those who have operated the route in the past?

The traffic out of Gatwick into Central London is better than going through Heathrow. When we chose Gatwick, the first thing we were told was: There was no slot, even though they suggested Gatwick to us. It is international aero politics as they would want to protect their own. We were to start operations on December 22, but they frustrated us. We wanted to start in January, we were also frustrated. They gave us ad-hoc slots that we couldn’t understand. I had never seen a thing like that and it was laughable, very annoying. However, we trudged on. At one time, we had to invite the Minister of Aviation, Festus Keyamo, into it. Luckily, he and the Director-General of Nigeria Civil Aviation Authority, NCAA, travelled with us to London to let them know that Nigeria would retaliate if they continued. I have to thank Keyamo for doing that as it made them change a little bit. With that, they now gave us 12:30 am for departure out of Nigeria. We wanted to depart even if it was a minute before midnight but they refused. When you are given 12:30 am, it can be very confusing at times.

For somebody who wants to travel on a Friday after work; when he gets to the website, he sees 12:30 am and says, ‘oh, Air Peace. Air Peace’s flight on Friday is early hours in the morning. I just wanted to do my job at the office that day before going to London, but Air Peace leaves at 12:30 am.’ The truth is that the time is equally good. If you want to travel on a Friday, you don’t need to travel 12:30 am, but you can travel on Saturday at 12:30 am. It means you will have to leave your house on Friday about maybe 11:00 in the night, you get to the airport to check in and you will still arrive in London the same Saturday morning. Like someone who left on Friday before midnight, you are leaving 30 minutes after midnight. All these things are intended to confuse, but we are going to educate Nigerians about it. It is the same thing. We are going to do a daily flight into London. Besides our three 777s, we are bringing in three Dreamliners, brand new Dreamliners to join the fray. We are going to do something exceptionally different, the competition is going to be massive and explosive. Nigerians will see something that they have never seen before because if you are not prepared for this kind of fray, you will get yourself burnt. They are waiting for us and we know they are. We are going to give them the best. When they came here and audited Air Peace, they couldn’t believe what they saw. They thought we couldn’t pass the third country operator, TCO, but we passed it because our safety standards in Air Peace are of universal acclaim. Air Peace got the IATA Operational Safety Audit, IOSA, right from the second year of operation which is unheard of. We have maintained that IOSA certification and we have got it six other times. When they came here to audit us, they thought they would see something that would make them reject us, but they didn’t see. They went back and issued the TCO approval. We are prepared, the capacity is there to give Nigerians a massive difference. Of course there is the penchant for foreign things among Nigerians. For instance, you will see some people say they flew to Dubai in Emirates, but the fact is that the same 777 Emirates uses, is what Air Peace uses.

Over time, we tend to embrace everything foreign in this country. If people see foreign water, they deem it better than Nigeria’s even if it was recycled from the septic tanks. This time, we are here to provide the difference, make it affordable for people and make it seamless. It is going to be a different ball game. What are we going to do differently? It starts with equipment, the capacity that we want to bring into the market and the ambience. And we have everything you can think of. Although it is now left for Nigerians to patronise their own. I am really pleased with the Nigerian travel agencies union, who came up with a slogan ‘Air Peace, our own.’ Some have even printed t-shirts with ‘save the Naira, fly Air Peace.’ If you know the amount of money this country is losing to foreign airlines, my country is bleeding massively through the foreign airlines. They will tell you their funds are trapped, yet they are increasing their frequencies into the same country. Who is fooling who? It is only when we try to embrace our own that we can save this country. You can’t leave everything for the government to do, the citizenry must play their parts. We are going through a very turbulent period and it is not something you will leave for the government. As citizens, we must play our parts. This is not a lucrative business but we are doing it to save jobs here because a lot of billions of dollars are leaving my country through the hands of the foreign airlines. This is the time to save the Naira.

On why Air Peace will approve rebate or discount for students

Departure back from Gatwick will be in the morning about 11:00.  At one time when they were giving us slots, they gave us one hour turnaround. How could you turn around a jumbo jet that carries over 360 people in one hour? To even fill a triple seven, you might even spend an hour; to disembark the passenger, that might take another hour; to clean the aircraft, that might take another hour, yet they gave us an hour turnaround. These were the things that they tried to do to us. Now, we have sorted that out.

So, when we land in London at about 6:30 am or thereabouts, the take off time back to Nigeria is about 11. About the student fares. Why did I do it in the first place? I have been massively disturbed about brain drain. We are losing our youthful ones to the outside world. A foreign diplomat once told me that the Nigerian state doesn’t know what it is losing by allowing this brain drain. He said we have to do something to keep our people home. In fact, the diplomat told me that it takes about N25 to N30 million to raise a kid up to the university level and at the end of the day, the kid will be lost to a foreign country where they also contribute. How do I make them come back home? Many of these people who are studying abroad – UK, Canada, US and all don’t have wealthy parents. When you look at the incessant strikes that occur in my country – when a child goes to school, the child’s parents don’t know when he or she will graduate. How about cultism? Many people are selling their houses and everything they have to give their children education abroad as education is very key in every society. When they get there, because they lack the funds to come home for holidays, they remain there for four or five years of school. At the end of the day, they become acclimatised and coming back to Nigeria becomes a problem because they have lost touch with their homeland. This is the problem, and we are losing them in droves. Have you thought of what will happen to this country in the next 40 years? The population will be depleted and what will be left here are old men. My children went to school in the UK and I bless God for it because I could afford it, but I made sure they came home every time. My children are all in Nigeria, they go to the UK when their friends invite them. Because they love it here, they want to stay here. You can say it is because I have money, but it is not so, it is because I made them come back home every holiday. It is the same thing I want to afford other indigent students. My daughter, Nnenna, used to tell me that her friends couldn’t go home and asked if I could give them money to buy tickets. This time, I have an airline that can do it. We are going to put measures in place to ensure that this subsidy is not abused. I want to do it for my nation because I love this country.

Your airline and others have been accused of incessant delays and cancellations. What are you doing about it?

The ICAO stated reasons for delays are about 99 and only four of them are attributed to the airlines. 95 per cent of them are not the fault of the airline. The truth is we fail to do things in this country the right way, and we blame the innocent airlines. If you know the reasons why delays and cancellations happen in this country, you will be shocked. Let no airline deceive you, no matter how hard an airline tries, delays and cancellations will be experienced as long as we don’t do things rightly. Number one, apart from safety, weather and other issues, unruly passenger behaviour. There is a misunderstanding of how airline scheduled operations are supposed to be run and the annoying thing is that even government officials don’t know. In fact, some people in the aviation agencies don’t know and one begins to wonder. When weather is the cause of delay or leads to cancellation, it is not the airline’s business to fly you first thing the next morning. No. All over the world, the convention is that the passenger is expected to reschedule to the next available date. That is how it is done. In Nigeria, those ones who couldn’t fly the previous day will be the first people you fly in the morning. When you do this, you’ve disrupted the schedule of that morning. Each aircraft does about six to eight flights daily. If it is one disruption, you are talking about eight massive flights disrupted for that day. Until Nigeria decides to practice aviation the way it is practiced worldwide, we would never see airlines in Nigeria not posting delays. 

People don’t know this. No airline wants to post a delay because once they do so, money is being lost. It is not in favour of the airline.

Your airline and others have been accused of lacking the capacity to serve the nation. If this is true, why have the airlines not achieved the necessary capacity? Do you think airlines in Nigeria have been adequately supported by government?

Adequately supported by the Nigerian government? It is zero. The airlines in Nigeria have never been adequately supported by any government in this country. That is the truth. We should understand that aviation is a catalyst to move this economy. Every country tries to invest in both airlines and aviation infrastructure. It is very important, but we lack that support. Is it financing? You borrow money at between 26 and 30 per cent. The other airlines that are being compared to Nigerian airlines borrow money at two to three per cent. In Nigeria, we are faced with multiple charges, making it one of the worst places to do aviation. It is very hostile. For us to say government is supporting us, first of all, it has to remove some of the charges. You are required to pay the NCAA five per cent charge of whatever fare raised. Some of the airports take about N8,000 per passenger for landing. There are so many charges. If an airline is charging N100,000, what comes to them at the end of the day might be N20,000. And that is what is used for insurance. What I use in Insuring one aircraft is what British Airways uses for insuring about eight other planes, yet they expect airlines to perform magic. On capacity. It is not true that we don’t have the capacity. It is also equally true that we don’t have capacity. When you look at it this way, no two airlines are the same, we have varying capacities depending on how the airline wants to play. An airline can decide that what it wants is to operate only Lagos to Abuja. If that airline has two aircraft, that is enough capacity. All these issues about lacking capacity are because they want to justify certain tendencies. We cannot be accused of lacking capacity, what we lack is government support. The minister followed us to the UK to get things right, that is support. The minister went to Saudi Arabia for the BASA and stood his ground that certain things should not be done, that is support. However, we need more. For instance, Qatar comes from Doha and lands in Abuja, then drops passengers. It goes to Port Harcourt and drops passengers. It comes back to Abuja and picks passengers before going back to its country. President Tinubu should know that his country is being fleeced because no country in the world allows that. Not even the mighty America would allow you to do city hopping. However, a poor country like Nigeria allows foreign tendencies to ravage its reserves and we are asking where the dollars are going. These things are putting pressure on the dollar. The foreign airlines are giving multiple frequencies into the country and multiple destinations. We are not even quarreling with multiple destinations, but let them fly from their country to a destination directly and leave from that place back to their country. We cannot continue to bleed the country just to please certain tendencies on political expediency. No. Air Peace flies Bombay in India, but when we applied to get New Delhi to join it, India refused. They said when we land in Bombay, we should get an Indian airline to take our passengers to Delhi. In Nigeria, government officials sign BASA agreements that are killing their country and they blame Nigerian airlines.