West Africa’s leading carrier, Air Peace has commenced the process to its long-haul operations to Dubai, Sharjah, London, Houston, Gauangzhou-China, Mumbai and Johannesburg, South Africa with demonstrative flights to Dakar and Senegal.
The flight to the West African country which kicked off at 08: 00hrs at the Murtala Muhammed International Airport, Lagos was accompanied by inspectors Nigeria’s civil aviation authorities.
According to Air Peace’s Corporate communications Manager, Chris Iwarah, “the non-revenue flights to demonstrate our capabilities with the Boeing 777 next visit Kano, Port Harcourt, Freetown, Johannesburg & Sharjah. This is what goes into ensuring the safety of our valued customers and crew – costly but necessary”.
According to atqnews.com, Air Peace which made history as the first Nigerian carrier to acquire and take delivery of a Boeing 777-200 on February 23, 2018, scaled a major regulatory hurdle in its path to international flight services, successfully performing the partial emergency evacuation and ditching demonstrations as part of the safety tests for the operation of its Boeing 777 aircraft.
Emergency aircraft evacuation refers to an exercise aimed at evacuating those on an aircraft when an emergency occurs on the ground, in water or mid-flight.
The ditching demonstration, however, simulates a planned water landing and evaluates the airline’s ability to handle such emergency.
The airlines’ image maker said:“The ditching demonstration, however, simulates a planned water landing and evaluates the airline’s ability to handle such emergency. “An emergency evacuation demonstration is mostly required when an airline proposes operating a specific aircraft type and model entering into its service for the first time. “Once the signal for it is given, the aircraft’s emergency evacuation equipment and 50 per cent of the required emergency exits and slides must be ready for use in a maximum of 15 seconds. “Although simulated, evacuation drills are a risky operation for crew and other participants — often leading to injury of varying degrees.”
The airlines’ chairman, Allen Onyema had earlier hinted in December 2018 that the carrier may also include other destination like Paris, Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Milan in Italy with its Boeing 737 max aircraft.
“Those 737Max, we don’t want Nigerians to fly through London to get to Amsterdam. We don’t want Nigerians to pay through their noses to get to their destinations Air Peace decided to bring these jets, the state-of -the- art Boeing 777 and brand new 737Max in other to do these destinations direct for Nigerians.”
“We want to start flying Lagos to Paris direct with those max, we want to deploy another max from Lagos to Frankfurt. We want to deploy the Max from Lagos to Amsterdam. We want to deploy it to Milan, we want to deploy it from Abuja to Jeddah. We want to do Kano to Dubai, we want to do Enugu-London with it and some days we use our triple seven to London through Lagos where majority of people travel.”
