DIRECTOR General of the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA), Captain Musa Nuhu has said that with the domestication of training inspectors and other technical professionals in the regulatory body will save it millions in dollars as well as cut training time from 10 years to just 18 months.
Nuhu made this known in a conversation with aviation journalists while reeling out the advantages the move has brought about stating that the COVID-19 pandemic made the body look inward since travelling out for such training became an issue.
The Director General stressed that he met a system where the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) would write Nigeria to request its certified instructors to carry out training elsewhere in the world while the country sends people out to other countries for training when they have the expertise. READ ALSO: NCAA seeks solutions to tackle dearth of safety, airworthiness inspectors as industry booms
He however said with this move, not only will the country save time in training and capital flight but it will also not affect the number of technical professionals on hand so the system keeps moving .
He said,”What this (training in-house) does apart from expediting the training and shrinking the time but it also saves us significant amount of money and foreign training fees and allowances for the staff going out training, the air tickets and also we lose their services while they are outside the country.
“So we are doing this in Nigeria. we are saving foreign exchange significantly and we are doing it locally in Otta and many places that money we are sending out, Nigeria businesses and hotels are getting that where we go do these training; so we are really complying with the local content act presidential directive and its really helping us.
He said earlier,” These trainings are being done by people who are ICAO Certified instructors, and its strange we met the system where ICAO calls on Nigeria to say: can we have these number of instructors to send to another country to go train, then we are sending our people out to go train somewhere. so we decided we use what we have in-house to get what we want.
On how the training is advantageous especially in saving time,the DG explained:
“Our inspectors have five (5) core mandatory training and because of the Covid-19 people are not able to travel out to go for training because of restrictions. what we have done is we have domesticated the training, we started November last year and for the first batch we spend through the first quarter of next year and during this process about 500 courses will be run.
“Some inspectors will do three four and five of the courses because its five mandatory courses. So we want to make sure all our current inspectors are fully qualified and some are doing refresher courses and we are going to do this training in about 18 months.
“In the past people used to be sent out, you cannot send out more than 50/60 in a year because of the expenses and you cannot send all your people out and ground the system so based on the system in the past it would have taken us 8-10 years to do this trainings we are doing in 18 months.
