Dana Air successfully concludes NCAA certification, set to acquire new air crafts
Barely three days after flight schedules of Dana Air were disrupted in Abuja by ongoing re-certification exercise by the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA), the airline has announced successful conclusion of the certification.
Giving a better picture of what transpired leading to the disruption of some of its flights schedules especially from Abuja to Lagos last week, the airline hinted of concluded arrangements to acquire new aircrafts to deepen operations from 2019.
Media and Communications Manager of Dana Air, Kingsley Ezenwa, told Business Hilights in Lagos that “We have finally concluded our re-certification exercise with the NCAA”.
According to him, “Re-certification in Nigeria’s aviation industry is a standard practice conducted every two years by the NCAA and during the period, an airline’s operation is totally reviewed from ground handling to quality assurance and particularly safety standards and we are glad to have scaled this rigorous process.
Ezenwa, who thanked NCAA for carrying out a thorough check on its operations before re-certifying the airline decried a negative report by an online platform during the course of the re-certification describing it as unnecessary.
He said “We wish to commend the NCAA for doing a thorough job and for giving us a clean bill of health which on its own reassures our guests that our 10 years experience in Nigeria’s airspace is no fluke. We are however worried about some orchestrated and baseless stories that were circulated while the exercise lasted. Unfortunately the sponsors of the story displayed crass ignorance of simple regulatory exercise as a result of their mischievous intentions.’’
“For the records, Dana Air presently has 5 aircraft out of which 2 are undergoing mandatory maintenance which in aviation is called C-checks. The safety and comfort of our guests comes first before any other consideration and we find such report really unnecessary. We advise the purveyors of such report to rather commend us, having served Nigeria for over 10 years and counting and showing massive commitment to changing the narrative about domestic airlines and Nigeria’s aviation industry as viable.’’
“However, we really feel the pain of our guests who have had to travel by road as a result of the shortage of aircraft across the country and hike in fares and wish to reassure them of our commitment towards putting an end to it in the coming year. At the moment, discussions with our financial partners are in top gear and very soon we will acquire some aircraft to add to our fleet.’’
“In the interim, our smart scheduling team have created additional flights to ensure that individuals, friends and families traveling this yuletide for business or leisure are not stranded or suffer unreasonable hike in fares for poor service’’
“Our position having gone through the review is to continue to maintain our operational efficiency which we have come to be known for, and we wish to sincerely apologize to our guests for the slight disruption in flights during the course of our re-certification, Ezenwa averred.
