The critical manpower capacity of the Nigerian Airspace Management Agency, (NAMA) has attained another giant leap with the rating of 40 Air Traffic Controllers by the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority, (NCAA).
This is coming barely two months after the controllers in the employ of NAMA recently threatened to down tool over sundry issues including insufficient capacity in the agency.
The air traffic controllers who cut across different cadres got their ratings after successfully passing the oral, practical and written examinations conducted in Lagos, Abuja, Kano, Port Harcourt as well as Benin airports and supervised by the regulatory authority.
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Olajumoke Adetona, the spokesperson for NAMA, said on Sunday that a total of 43 Air Traffic Controllers took part in the rigorous rating examinations held between November and December 2014 on Aerodrome, Approach, Approach Radar, Area/Airways and Area Control Surveillance, adding that out of this number, 40 were successful while three were not.
Meanwhile, Ibrahim Abdulsalam, the managing director of the agency, has commended the air traffic controllers for justifying the huge resources invested in the exercise by coming out with an impressive result.
According to Abdulsalam, “as part of management’s strategy to build a robust safety infrastructure across the Nigerian airspace, training and re-training of critical manpower have remained the focal point of his administration.” While congratulating the air traffic controllers on their brilliant performance, Abdulsalam expressed confidence that the latest ratings would further boost the critical manpower need of NAMA, especially in the Area Radar Control service.
It would be recalled that in its determination to build critical manpower capacity in the area of operations, over 124 air traffic controllers were rated in 2014, just as a batch of 40 ATCs were recently trained on Performance Based Navigation Flight Procedures in Cairo, Egypt while another batch of 5 was trained on Wind Shear Equipment handling in Germany.
