- Agency surveying Jalingo Airport to develop satellite guidance
The Nigeria Airspace Management Agency ( NAMA) has said shutting down the radar while upgrade is on without adequate backup is akin to slowing down traffic in busy airports and creating safety hazards hence the importance of transportable radars to act as redundancy when upgrade is on.
This is just as the agency said it is in Jalingo, the Taraba State capital mapping out a survey to aid in the development of Satellite guidance in Jalingo Airport, being the only airport in Nigeria that does not have satellite access yet.
Speaking to newsmen recently the Ag Managing Director of the agency, Mr. Mathew Lawrence Pwajok explained that redundancies in air space surveillance, navigation and Communication is key to keep the system going in order to avoid a complete systems shutdown during upgrades or occurrences unplanned for like a breakdown.
Paajok said, “We have started the upgrade of the Total Radar Coverage and this upgrade is going to be software and hardware. If I want to upgrade Abuja it might take us two weeks or three to shut down the system and physically upgrade the hardware component and also run the software component.
“If I shutdown an airport as busy as Abuja without any alternative I’d be creating a crisis, endangering safety and security of the airport. So we have what is called a transportable radar. If I have to shut down Lagos radar with the busy traffic we are having it is going to slow down traffic, create safety hazards and the air traffic control will depend on the pilot to give his position then they will visualise and separate aircraft as against using a radar to track and pinpoint position.
“So the transportable radar is one of contingency. The radar in Abuja can go down, it is a system. What do we do? Secondly, we are upgrading since we have approval and are currently working on it. We cannot shut down radar in places like Abuja or Lagos without having backup systems. These systems will provide us the capability for us to do the upgrade of the existing system and enable its contingency anywhere else.
The TRACON is located at nine sites in Lagos, Kano, Abuja, Port Harcourt, Maiduguri, Ilorin, Talata-Mafara, Obubra and Numan all connected by V-SAT; expertly located after feasibility studydevoid of any political considerations with each having a reach of 256 nautical miles ( 500 km radius) so when it is triangulated they overlap each other giving Nigeria a total radar Coverage.
The Federal Executive Council ( FEC) in February 2022 approved N23bn for the upgrade of NAMA’s Total Radar Coverage of Nigeria (TRACON) hardware and software and migration from EUROCAT system to a higher TopSky radar system.
On Jalingo Airport, the Ag MD said all airports in the country but Jalingo has satellite access and so the agency is working to upgrade Jalingo into an airport with satellite capabilities to ensure all the airports are covered.
” A NAMA team is in Jalingo doing a survey to prepare for the development of Satellite guidance into Jalingo Airport. Whether it is private, state airport, federal airports, in addition to ground equipment, we also have satellite based navigation access into all the airports and that is to ensure that if the ground equipment fails, satellites doesn’t fail. And so any airport that is equipped with a satellite system, what you call a Global Positioning System( GPS), you can navigate, approach and land there.