Flight resumption: I think Nigerian airlines should stop serving food ― Onyema

*Says_“In Nigeria, somebody flying from Lagos to Akure for about 25 minutes flight, he will expect you to give him pounded yam”

Executive Chairman of Air Peace Airlines, Allen Onyema said Nigerian airlines should stop serving food during short flights.

Onyeama while speaking during a webinar organized by Aelex Partners with the theme: “Survival Strategies for Nigerian Airlines” proposed discontinuing serving of foods to passengers can save the industry some costs.

“Now we are doing short flights in Nigeria, flight of 40 minutes or 30 minutes at most one and a half hours, the most important thing every airline is to, you don’t need any NCAA or the regulator to tell you what to do, cut out feeding, time has come for Nigerian airlines to stand up and stand firm”.

“If one airline says I want to drag customers to ourselves, we want to serve food, we want to serve pounded yam and egusi, good luck to the person.

“But going forward I think Nigerian airlines should stop serving food, in America 2 hours flight they don’t serve nothing, they give you water.

“In Nigeria, somebody flying from Lagos to Akure for about 25 minutes flight, he will expect you to give him pounded yam”, he added.

Onyeama also hinted that his airline, Air Peace will downsize its operations and some staff may be asked to proceed on leave until flight services increased while noting few of the airline’s aircraft would be deployed at resumption as well as the reduction in the number of flights.

“Even we at Air Peace, we are going to downsize, I expect every airline to downsize because the passengers are not going to be there in the beginning, it will take time, so if you push out all your planes, you have yourself to blame.

“Out of our 13 Boeing 737 in Airpeace aircraft, we are only going to deploy 4 of them, out of our 8 ERJ’s, we are going to deploy only 6 because those ones are just 50 seaters, so we will manage with those ones.

“From 100 flights per day, Air peace is going down to 42 flights, so going to Abuja will no longer be every hour, do downsizing of your operations is good in cutting cost, so, we are downsizing our operations to almost about 60%, we are going to do about 40% of our operations and even in that 40%, we are not going to carry 40% of the passengers we use to carry before.

“Passenger figures are not going to be the same again like what it use to be years back, everything has changed, so going into operations, a new set of regulations will emerge.”