Ikeja – The President of Aviation Round Table, Capt. Dele Ore, has said that Nigeria required an aircraft assembly plant, if it hopes to develop its aviation sector to global standards.
Ore told aviation correspondents in Lagos that he wondered why the country could not boast of at least, one aircraft assembly plant, decades after its independence.
While expressing confidence that Nigeria had enough manpower to float a formidable aircraft assembly plant, he advised that the Federal Government could fast-track it by inviting Nigerian aviation professionals in the Diaspora back home to participate in the project.
Ore, a former Director of Operations at the liquidated Nigerian Airways, said that it was a shame that routine C-check maintenance on airplanes could not be carried out in the country.
“There are competent Nigerians. If you need to call people from retirement, call them. Nigerians are out there in major aviation corporations abroad.
“If you go to Boeing, Pratt and Whitney, General Electric, Rolls-Royce in the United States and Airbus in Europe, Nigerians are there in their top-level management.
“They can come back home and set these things up for us. There is nothing we are not capable of doing, even to assemble aircraft here in Nigeria. We have done it before,” he added.
“We have dismantled aircraft and we rebuilt it here in Nigeria before. So what is wrong today? We should be assembling aircraft in Nigeria. The Beetle air experiment was there, but they killed it.
“And the exploits of Nigerian Airways with Boeing 707 was there. If we could do that in 1977, how come we cannot even do a check C in the country? It is a shame,” he said.
