‘No airline makes profit on wet-leased aircraft’
Managing Director of Aero Contractors, Captain Ado Sanusi has said no airline can succeed or make profit basing their operations on wet-leasing aircraft stating that most wet-lease agreements in the country are only to fill a particular lacuna for a short term.
This is just as he has said that no aviation industry can thrive without a formidable maintenance organisation hence Aero MRO’s drive for expansion and strategic partnerships.
Captain Sanusi made these known while reacting to the trend of wet- leases that have come into the country stating that it was only for a time and that the airlines will need to maintain their own aircraft.
According to the Aero helmsman, it is getting harder for airlines to maintain their aircraft abroad hence the reason Aero MRO is increasing its hangar capacity and training its technical personnel to enable it to handle at least 90% of the aircraft flown in the Nigerian Airspace mostly 737s, extending to the NGs, the Embraers and Airbus the prevalent aircraft type in the country.
He said,”For any airline to have a wet-lease, it is an interim arrangement, it is not a permanent arrangement. There is no airline that would succeed and make profits with wet lease, it is not possible. I believe these airlines that are into wet lease are doing it temporarily and would go back to flying their own aircraft.
“Now we understand that it is getting harder and harder for airlines to take their aeroplanes out for maintenance that is why we are trying to increase our capacity. As you see we are trying to expand this hangar, we will also increase the hangars.
” We are also looking at strategic partnerships with MROs around the world especially with Africa first to see where we can bring expertise to augment what we have. So we can cater for, if not all; at least 90% of the types of airplanes flown in the Nigerian Airspace, mostly 737s, the Embraers and we might probably look at the Airbus like I said, so we will start with line maintenance.” He said.
“We are also working hard to ensure that we have investors that would invest in maintenance because you must have a formidable maintenance organisation for an aviation industry to prosper.”
He further explained that the organisation is already training staff so it would have adequate personnel to convince the regulator, NCAA that it had capacity to handle it’s increase.
Sanusi said,” For us to expand the MRO and maintain more types we need to train more technical staff, it is a no brainer, we must train and we have started. We have started training in the Dash-8 Q300/400.
“We are commencing training soon for the NGs, we have trained already engineers on the Embraer 145, we would start training, apart from types of aircraft, we would also start training for components engineers to improve our capabilities in the workshop, there are so many things we are looking at the most important among everything is training.
“Before we put anything to the NCAA in increasing our capacity, we must show them that we have accurate staff, well trained.”
