He is the Managing Director, Medview Airlines and a former staff of defunct Nigerian Airways and because of the inhuman treatment meted to Nigerian pilgrims in Saudi Arabia, he decided to venture into airline business. Muneer Bankole spoke on aviation and other related issues.

On the motivation for going into the aviation industry

My passion for aviation industry dates back to 1969 when one of my aunties was going to the United States. This was when the current GAT was the international airport and she was boarding a DC10 with handkerchief waving people.

The mood was like she was going on a journey of no return.   It was there I started nursing the ambition of seeing myself one day working around the environment.

So from that period it has been something of interest that I feel very happy and excited about to have worked in that environment for over 35 years. It has been a passion for me.

Apart from the passion, why the decision to become an investor?

Something you grew up in, something you sleep in, work inside, and you probably see yourself to be blessed to have seen the entirety of the aviation industry like I did, you have to fully identify with it.   Aviation is a name, high risk in terms of putting the parameters together.

It is like God has assigned something to you, just like the pilgrimage airlifting; the very day we started airlifting, we saw it as an assignment given to us by God, so we carried it out within a short period of two – three months;   25, 000 -30, 000 pilgrims airlifted to Saudi and brought back.

How has the journey been?

It is a thing of joy for people to continue to appreciate God daily, but it has not been a bed of roses. We have had ups and downs but you keep your faith in Him and you keep going. It has been beautiful so far.

Many people think the airline business is very profitable; they invest a lot of money initially and are not patient to watch the business grow before they start expecting huge returns. Adequate technical knowledge of aviation business and the operating environment would guide you to run a profitable airline.

A lot of people moved into the airline industry from other sectors of the economy without adequate preparation and not very detailed business plan, thinking they could do magic, and you could see that the result as such ill-preparation has led to the collapse of many airlines.

On what it takes to run a successful airline

Once you know the business you are doing and understand everything that goes around the business, it gives you little joy.

To do well in this airline business, as a serious operator, you have to have a good grasp of the technical knowledge of the industry, not just being a graduate of any discipline. You need to be fully equipped about the dynamics and intricacies of the airline business.

If your personnel want to play you out, you call them to order because you have the knowledge of the industry. But, if you do not have the knowledge, some personnel could propose wrong ideas to you that could ruin the business.

You need committed pilots, committed engineers, ground personnel; finance comes into place to support your operations and day to day running.

And on a serious note, safety is the key of all. You must be safety conscious that everything from the point of checking-in to the end of flight and return is in compliance with laid down rules.

There is no cutting corner. It is so because you wake up in the morning seeing an aircraft flying, you ask yourself which runway is in the sky?

You must match your words with action as not to negotiate anything short of standards.

Could it be said that lack of sincerity or cutting corners led to safety issues in the past?

No, there are many factors. We can’t just use one approach to come out with a verdict that it was as a result of ABC.

If you go through the history of accidents, 60-70% of them are due to human errors.

That you cannot take away from aviation, but that position is critical at that moment and the pilot must take a decision either in good or bad faith, but it is between him and God on how to handle the situation. That is why I said that you as an investor, you as the employee and those who are employers must be honest and sincere. Nobody will say he is not affected. Everybody will be affected.

Training as key to safety

Training is the key, there must be training and retraining. We send our pilots on retraining called simulator every six months. You must continue to see your engineers going for training. You must ensure that your ground personnel continue to go for training in customer care service.

Training takes a lot of money, but you must put it in place so your personnel are current, because there are lots of changes in standard procedures in aviation.

Things change from time to time. The aircraft you are talking about might not be the same aircraft in the market, those things you think are there, the manufacturers might need to update you.

On financing

The honest thing is for you to have the entire thing key together in the component that makes the total operational cost. You make sure that revenue is placed on those elements that keep the aircraft going.

One, the aircraft maintenance must be standard; there are specifics maintenance. When the aircraft flies certain hours, it goes for specific checks. There are 2As, 1As, 4As and 8As. And when your aircraft attain certain hours or within the limit of C of A expiration, the aircraft must go for the mandatory C check. This might take you two months to get the aircraft back for use. Fly 200 hours, shut down.

Fly 400 hours, shut down. The same thing applies to the pilots, training. The same applies to the engineers and the ground staff. Everything is built into your cost. The only thing that works in this environment that is so challenging and which I keep repeating all the time is fuel cost.   It takes 40% out of your business.

We are appealing to the government to come to the assistance of airlines in the area of high cost of aviation fuel. The way out is for government to have a meeting with airline operators and fuel marketers and the regulatory aviation agencies to resolve this challenge. It is having a huge impact on airline operations.

The government agencies are other elements. This is our country; you can understand that you pay to NAMA for flying Lagos -Abuja -Kano within the context of your country.

After NAMA, you pay to the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA). All these are payments for flying in your country. If a foreign airline flies into your country and is made to make such payments, it is understandable, but not domestic airlines. So, what is government giving to you for servicing the industry? How many airlines for 170 million Nigerians? About four or five.

So how should government protect domestic airlines?

It is the responsibility of government to provide the enabling environment for the industry to grow. As an operator, all the government agencies must do is to let you fly in a friendly, seamless and stress less environment.

We are blessed with everything in this country, but we will continue to pray that God takes care of everything.

On the recommendation that NAMA, NCAA and FAAN be merged

Apart from the position of the Airline Operators of Nigeria (AON); personally,   I think it is for us to sit down and ask ourselves that those put together to take the position, are they aviators? You need to get those in the industry together to give you sincere inputs.

NCAA by design of the International Civil Aviation Authority is a regulatory authority, all over the world. For airline standard procedures, that is the body responsible.

NAMA is a service provider. They are to give navigational and aeronautical guidance and every other charge to you.   And when you talk of airport services, those are the functions of FAAN; so you find out that every one of them has different duties to perform.

We wish government would listen to superior argument and do the needful on the issue of merger and a decision taken in the interest of the nation.

On the question of government floating an airline

I will take you back to Nigeria Airways days. Beautifully as you can say in the 70s and the 80s, Nigeria Airways was solely the airline that covered not only the country but also the West African region. Nigeria Airways would bring passengers from Senegal, Ghana to Lagos before flying them to UK and other destinations in the world. Lagos became a hub.

In1990 -2000, when there was this issue of government coming to talk of liquidation, the International Finance Corporation, one of the finance companies assigned by government to give them a position, said liquidation was the last option. The first option was to look for partnership with a technical airline like British Airways or Lufthansa.

Another thing then was that Nigeria Airways had a lot of assets in terms of properties all over the world. That should have been put into consideration so that government will hold those things in trust for the airline and fund them.

Those properties they gave away would have been of great advantage today. The shame that the nation is having today would not have been there. A country of 170 million, no national airline; it is a shame.

In the past, when you saw green-white-green in any airport in the world, even if   you were at the airport for sightseeing, seeing it made you feel as if you were back home. I think we deserve to have a national airline.

On Medview’s growth from a travel agency to having scheduled flights

Medview started as a consultant to state governments and lot of achievement was made along that line especially in the days of Governor Ahmed Tinubu in Lagos State. We did that for eight years and with other states like Kwara and Yobe.

Later, we found that hajj needed to be packaged well. I was the country manager for Nigeria Airways in Saudi Arabia for six years and I saw a lot of mess in the way Nigerian pilgrims were handled.

Nigerians were sleeping on the highways and everywhere during hajj and Umurah. I felt something was wrong, that those Nigerians were being abused as they were dumped there by airlines that refused to come back to pick them.

So, I came back and applied for hajj license. The first time I did in 2006, I lost the one million dollars I borrowed, because they claimed it was not a game for young boys; it was not a game for southerners, it was not a game for people like me.

But I took the challenge in 2007, I applied again and they saw the seriousness in me. Some of them knew I had the experience and so they granted us the permission to lift the international pilgrims which was the most difficult and critical of all the hajj operations.

Those international pilgrims are well exposed people who know their rights as against those who go on conventional pilgrimage like our mothers who are taken advantage of because of lack of education and so they are treated shabbily.

So with the permission to lift international pilgrims, we had to travel round the country and we ended up having a base in Kano to take care of the core-North; we had another base in Abuja and the last in Lagos.

We developed the three bases and raised committees to run the show with us and that was the beginning of the story. We were given about 8, 000-9, 000 pilgrims, we ended up going with 14,000 and returning with 18,000 pilgrims as the big boys could not do that.

The success gave the government the opportunity to upgrade us to conventional pilgrim handler and we have been doing our best since. We want to say that we have been blessed as we have made changes and introduced lots of incentives, so we are seeing the blessing of God. We see what we are doing as a call to duty by God.

On foray into domestic operations

We went into domestic operations after looking at all the areas of the aviation business, the major hard time was the AOC that took us about 16-18 months to run.

It was five stages, 27 approvable manuals, 13 acceptable manuals making a total of 40 manuals. You need to get a minimum of two aircraft; you need to get personnel working around you for six months with no equipment, to put your manuals in place, to show your key post holders, you have to pay salaries, set up base stations and those things you claim you have to be inspected.

You have maintenance base, you have operational base, the corporate head office, you have the training school and we had all these to show. So we give thanks to God that we got the AOC, and since then we have flown up to 600,000 passengers.

As an airline, we have been reaching out to passengers in far flung places. We bring the airline closer to the people in places like Jalingo, Yobe, Maiduguri, Enugu, and other places.

Our strategy is that all routes in Nigeria must be developed. One of the ways of achieving this is to partner with the relevant authorities to make air travel convenient and affordable. In some of the states in the North, the governors are even asking how they could be of help to open up the airports.

Our belief in Medview Airlines is that there is no airport or route that is not viable, but you need to do a detailed business plan to develop the route to make it attractive.

On the transformation of the airports

We need to thank the former Minister of Aviation, Princess Stella Oduah for the transformation; this has given the country a new name to Nigeria.

It has given confidence to the travelling public and investors as this has given us more windows to operate to some regional airports like Accra, Dakar and we intend having Jeddah and Dubai in the Middle East.

On the role of airline and tourism

The first window to any country is the airline; before you visit any country you need the airline. What we should be doing in this country is for the AON and the tourism body to work together.

When I am flying my aircraft, all the souvenirs that will be given to passengers will reflect the tourist attractions of the country to let the passengers know that there are things to see in the country. I will advocate that there should be a strong synergy.

I know we have lots of tourism attractions in this country that we need to sell.

– Courtesy: Vanguard