By Chinelo Obogo
 
The Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) and the Accident Investigation Bureau (AIB) are working more closely to promote air safety and reduce incidents, accidents, it has been revealed.
 
At a one-day conference with the theme: “Prevention of Human Factors in Air Accident Occurrence”, organised by the AIB-N in collaboration with the League of Airports and Aviation Correspondent, LAAC, in Lagos, the Director General of the NCAA, Captain Musa Nuhu said the regulatory agency and the AIB are working together promote air safety, adding that there was a committee in place that is alive to this responsibility.
 
He emphasised that every accident is a tragedy, adding that the global accident rates according to records have continued to increase from 2015 to 2019.
 
“In 2015, 92 accidents with the accident at 2.8, 2016, 75(2.1), 2017, 88(2.4), 2018, 98(2.6) and 2019, 114(2.9),” Nuhu said. 
 
Captain Nuhu also insisted that it behoves on investigation authorities to unravel the probable causes and contributory factors of these accidents, make recommendations to prevent a recurrence.
 
He said that, as the regulator, they sit down with AIB and review the recommendations to make sure that these are recommendations they can implement without violating  other regulations or require the changing of some of its regulations to resolve this problem.
 
The NCAA DG stressed that more than 70% of aircraft accidents and incidents were traceable to human factors causes while others are weather, equipment, maintenance, airport/ATC and others.
 
He defined human factor as “Matching the Man (Person) to the Job and Matching the Job to the Man under the prescribed conditions”. This implies compatibility of the person to the job i.e. preparing, adapting, enabling, equipping and conforming the person to perform the assigned task to achieve the design and expected objectives. Any mismatch will contribute to human error and is a precursor to an accident.
 
“Develop appropriate Safety Recommendations that are based on safety risk assessments and cost-benefit analysis; and Prevent reoccurrence and improve safety records. All we have done is to make the committee more active, more alive to its responsibilities and as a regulatory agency we must work together with them.
 
“Apart from being a regulatory requirement we cannot enhance the safety of the industry without working together, if there is any accidents or incidents or whatever, AIB investigates it and in the process of their investigation, they could find NCAA derelict in its responsibilities that is why you have independent body that is rare but still that is why you have an independent body to that and they made recommendations.
 
“And also the recommendations are cost effective, so we just have to work together it is for the benefit of the industry, we all have the same goal, improving on safety and prevention of accidents and incidents.” he said. 
 
The AIB commissioner, Akin Olateru, in his opening remark, stated that aircraft accidents are dominated by the failure of human factor failure  explaining that it is vital to understand the complexity of human factors within a system with the intent of reducing it to the barest minimal.
 
He said; “Despite of a positive development in the trend of accidents recorded since the beginning of the 21st century, the number of air accidents is still unsatisfactory. Consequently, it is of paramount importance to do everything that would contribute to substantial reduction of the human factor failure in air transportation.
 
“A system of models appears to be an important tool for overall understanding of the complexity of human factors, serving as starting-points to an analytical and classification research of the human factor. At the same time, these models enable qualified investigation and assessment of the causes of air accidents and incidents, thereby preventing them from repeated occurrence.”