BY: OLAPEJU OLUBI
The Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN) has blamed unserviceability of runway lights at the Kano airport for the diversion of two Kano bound flights to Lagos.
In a statement signed by the authority’s Director of Public Affairs & Consumer Protection, Abdullahi Yakubu-Funtua, FAAN apologized for the diversion while it announced that night operations has since resumed as new cables were installed on Sunday, 16 July, 2023 leading to restoration of all runway lights.
Yakubu-Funtua stated that on July 15, 2023 at about 1600hrs, the airfield maintenance team of the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria observed that the runway lighting would not come on after the scheduled daily maintenance work of replacing old and weak Airfield cables with new one’s at runway 06/24.
A development which made the maintenance team immediately initiated fault finding procedures along the cable route to identify the problem and restore power to the airfield lighting circuit.
He said It was however observed that the entire runway circuit was affected, leading to the failure of the Runway 06/24 edge light, the Taxiway Alpha edge light, PAPI and signage.
According to him; “As at 1900hrs local time, the fault had yet to be isolated and power supply to the runway could not be restored leaving Runway in a total blackout which affected night operations. Arriving flights had to be diverted to alternate airports”.
“At 2300hrs, after all efforts to restore power supply to the runway failed, Operations department initiated a NOTAM action for the closure of Runway 06/24 between the hours of 2300hrs on 15th July to 07:00hrs of 16th July, 2023,” he said.
