Why Investing in Aerospace Engineering can save Nigeria's struggling Aviation Industry

The Nigerian aviation sector is above 70years, but there is hardly any sign that the industry has an effective plan for fixing its prevalent operational and technical shortcomings. The industry is poorly managed and lacks the requisite technical expertise to move it to a better level. You would be shocked to know that only two airports of the more than 15 airports operational nationwide are operating profitably. The revenue from the profitable ones is sustaining the other airports. In the space of barely 12 months, between 2005 and 2006, Nigeria recorded four high profile plane crashes that claimed about 325 lives in total, with the Sosoliso Airlines crash considered as one of the most tragic in the country's history because half of the passengers on board were schoolchildren on their way home for Christmas celebrations.

It would be not very ethical to say this industry has not been progressing over the decades since the sector's inception; for example, in 2006, Nigeria passed new laws and worked on its air safety record so that the United States of America finally gave the country a Federal Aviation Authority Category 1 safety rating in the year 2010. However, despite that achievement, the aviation sector is still not as good as you would expect it to be as its operational and technical efficiency is barely encouraging; just two years after receiving the safety rating from the United States of America, a McDonnell Douglas (MD-83) - operated by a privately-owned domestic airline, Dana Air - crash-landed and claimed about 159 lives in the process with the circumstances surrounding the crash even more saddening as reports attributed the cause of the crash to operational negligence and technical failure.

There have been so many efforts to solve the industry's problems. A notable glimmer of hope was when the domestic Airline, Arik Air, took over the defunct Nigerian Airways facilities in Lagos (The Nigerian Airways was the country's flag carrier in the Aviation sector that ceased operations in 2003 after series of accidents, fatalities, and problems of mismanagement); however, that hope was quickly replaced with disappointments as on the 17th of February, 2017, the Federal Government via the Asset Management Corporation of Nigeria (AMCON), took over Arik Air due to the airline being in a massive financial debt which was threatening to force the airline to shut down permanently.

There are so many reasons for the inadequacies and below-par performance of the Nigerian aviation sector, as the lack of favorable governmental policies, inadequate investments, and poor airport infrastructures. Still, a significant and consistent problem involves the unavailability of the required human capital or technical personnel in the sector. The sector is plagued with mismanagement, an inadequately qualified workforce, and below-standard technical expertise.

Hence, the aviation industry's way forward is for the country to massively invest in its personnel and technical capacity to thrive truly.

Improving the technical expertise and qualification of personnel in the Nigerian aviation sector is an effective solution that can drastically improve the overall performance of the industry as human capital remains the most active factor in any given problem an industry might be experiencing, because even if they need to encourage financial investments or enforce better government policies cannot be disregarded, it all still boils down to the capacity of the people involved in the sector and how the funds and investment pumped into the sector can be well utilized.

In 2016, Boeing estimated that Africa needs to produce about 22,000 pilots and 24,000 aircraft engineers in 20 years to develop its aviation sector. When you consider that Nigeria's population is around 18% of the entire Africa population, it means that the country needs to produce about 130 new qualified pilots and 146 new aerospace engineers every year till 2036. The failure to do this is a major reason behind the sector being handled by less skilled people or expatriates who do not stay for long and repatriate with the skill and knowledge. The little investments even being made into the sector's technical expertise have mostly been into pilot training. In contrast, the training in producing qualified aerospace engineering is not good enough if the sector wishes to really grow.

Aerospace Engineering: We need more qualified professionals

Practical training in aerospace engineering barely exists in Nigeria; However, about 11 universities are credited with offering aerospace engineering as a university course. Only about four of these universities try to give practical training and lectures about aerospace engineering. Even the standards from these four can barely be compared to other countries with a developed aviation sector. The problem with this sort of educational inadequacy is that young Nigerians who are seeking a professional career in Aeronautical or Astronomical Engineers mostly prefer to apply to foreign universities to learn their trade truly; hence the workforce output yearly is minimal to cater for all the technical requirements that the entire industry might need for all its operations as most students who gain the requisite knowledge abroad, prefer to get jobs over there mostly due to a more favorable economy, therefore making only a few to return to Nigeria as qualified aerospace engineers.

Hence, deliberate efforts must be made in boosting the educational and training capacity of aerospace engineers within the country. Several options can be taken to achieve this, like investing heavily in technological facilities for aerospace engineering departments in selected public universities or training institutes, especially universities of technologies. The Government can also establish more specialized aerospace training institutes – like the Air Force Institute of Technology, Kaduna – in the country that focuses not only on pilot training but all the technical and maintenance operations involved in the field. Although this would require a lot of work and financial investments, the long-term benefits would outweigh the efforts put into it. Besides, previous supposed more important financial investments into the government sector have barely yielded the expected results.

The potential benefit of this is the availability of more technically capable hands being produced within the country; it leads to more capable human resources being spread across various indigenous airlines and enables domestic and indigenous airlines to have the human resources to call upon like their foreign counterparts. The essence of this investment in the aviation sector's overall engineering capacity would also result in more professionally trained staff in the entire industry and a boost in domestic operations. The competition that would also be brewed from the even spread of human capital would boost the entire aviation market as the trust in the market would increase and make the industry more attractive to financial investors and private equity firms both abroad and at home, therefore, also helping to solve the issue of unattractiveness to private and foreign investors.

The validity of investing in the sector's technical capacity can be seen with the progress made by Ethiopian Airlines, an African airline in Ethiopia. The airline was recently voted the African airline of the decade in 2020 after scooping several awards in the preceding years. Aside from the other strategic actions put in place under Tewolde Gebramariam, CEO of Ethiopian Airlines, the company's investment in the aviation sector's engineering capacity in Ethiopia remains one of the significant growth strategies employed by it. This was epitomized in a 2014 interview with the International Air Transport Association (IATA), in which Tewolde was commenting about the development problems facing the African aviation sector; Tewolde’s commented that "The third pillar [responsible for the company’s success] is human resources. This really is our foundation. People are our strongest and most precious asset…instead of complaining, why don’t we train enough people not only for the airline but also for the region?”, he also claimed that the airline had expanded the intake of students at the Ethiopian Aviation Academy in Addis Ababa from 200 to 1,000 students per year. One can hardly be surprised that the airline is achieving so much as the deliberate partnership with the Ethiopian Government in investing in the sector's technical human capacity has been paying off.

Therefore, Nigeria also has to deliberate efforts to train more aerospace engineers and improve its technical capacity to develop the sector. The Nigerian Government must put in more efforts in partnership with domestic airlines to create a feasible and workable plan that enables an easy transition from gaining technical expertise in universities and institutions to becoming qualified industry engineers.

As already stated before in this article, arguments could be made that many problems facing the sector and the political and governmental factors can also be blamed. These arguments are valid, but the reality remains that significant investment has to be made in producing more aerospace engineers and technical experts in Nigeria. Maybe then our domestic airlines can also receive awards and recognitions similar to those obtained by our African counterparts like the Ethiopian airline.