The Chief Executive Officer of Air Peace, Allen Onyema, has announced that the airline has reserved three aircraft serving as buffers to mitigate issues of delay and flight cancellations.
He said the airplanes would tackle complaints by passengers as regard flight delays and cancellations. These aircraft are parked to serve as a standby in case of minor or major faults in any of the airline’s operational planes.
Onyema said this while speaking to journalists at a briefing held at the airline’s corporate headquarters in Lagos. He, however, noted that while many of the delays and flight cancellations were not caused by the airline, Onyema promised that the standby aircraft would always be at the service of passengers.
“We have increased our buffer from one aircraft to three. What this means is that we now have three aircraft parked in case any aircraft develops either a minor or major fault, be it a bird strike or whatever. This is to further tackle flight delays or cancellations,” he said.
Onyenma explained that delays caused by bird strikes, weather, runway maintenance, among others, were not within the control of any airline, appealing to Nigerians to see Air Peace as their own.
He further stated that Nigeria has been stigmatised by foreign nations, saying the country can be freed from such shackles when “the people accept to love their own.”
The airline operator mentioned that there seems to have been what looks like an increased number of complaints against the airline recently, explaining that such was noticed because of the airline’s capacity.
“For instance, if Air Peace experiences a 30 per cent delay, the number would be about 32 flights compared to an airline that has its own 30 per cent to be three or six flights,” he said.
Onyema revealed that the airline currently has 49 aircraft, 36 of which were outrightly purchased and four on wet lease. He noted that the airline will, by September, launch operations into the Caribbean nations as well as China and India.
“We are connecting Nigerians in the Diaspora. We started these operations some months ago, we flew to St. Kitts, we also transported over 200 passengers to Jamaica, we have increased our B777 to four because our China operations will soon start. We are already discussing the acquisition of wide-bodied aircraft based on a wet lease arrangement,” he said.