The Nigerian Airspace Management Agency (NAMA) has successfully split the Lagos Sub-FIR into two sectors: Lagos West Area Control Centre on 120.9MHz radio frequency and Lagos East Area Control Centre on 127.3MHz frequency.
In a statement signed by the General Manager, Public Affairs, Mr. Khalid Emele, this split is expected to further enhance ground and air communication, reduce workload on Air Traffic Controllers (ATCs), while also leading to enhanced safety in the airspace.
The sectorisation which took off last Thursday, July 18, 2019, is a culmination of a two-year strategic plan by NAMA to achieve sectored operations in the Lagos sub-FIR owing to the then congested single radio frequency enroute control operations as a result of increasing volume of traffic. This he said posed a lot of challenges to both pilots and air traffic controllers.
While speaking, Capt. Fola Akinkuotu, Managing Director, NAMA, said that it took the agency 16 years to achieve the feat, noting that the commitment and determination of staff was responsible for the actualisation of this feat.
Akinkuotu emphasised that the agency had put in place several measures to ensure its effective takeoff and listed the measures to include the development of standard operating procedures (SOPs) and a test-run of the procedures at the Nigerian College of Aviation Technology (NCAT), Zaria and in-house training of needed manpower to boost capacity in the two sectors.
Others according to him were enhancement of the required support facilities for ground-ground and air-ground communication; update of 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 (AIP) supplement on May 9, 2019 to give airspace users 56 days notification as required by the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) and Part 14 of the Nigerian Civil Aviation Regulations.
