Passengers stranded as airlines cut domestic flights

By Kasim Isa Muhammad

Kanempress News

16th October 2024

Reports gathered by Kanempress says the shortage of aircraft in the domestic airline market has worsened, limiting available flights for passengers.

Many passengers were stranded across Nigeria across on Tuesday as they could not secure flights to their destinations.

Kanempress reports that on that flights on the busiest routes, Lagos-Abuja and Abuja-Lagos, were hugely impacted as many passengers could not secure seats as of 4pm yesterday.

None of the airlines indicated that it had seats on any of the Lagos-Abuja flights.

For instance, a check on Max Air flight slated for 6pm indicated that the seats were fully booked.

However, it was later gathered that the flight did not operate.

Similarly, Air Peace flights for 6:30pm and 8:30pm on Tuesday showed that they were fully booked or did not operate as they indicated no seat on their websites.

An airline operator attributed the challenge to capacity constraints being faced by the airlines.

“There is a shortage of capacity and many people are travelling,” the operator said.

Another operator said, “What I can tell you is that most of the airlines have capacity issues and they have also reduced their operations, cutting down drastically to avoid issues.”

An Aviation analyst, Mr Olumide Ohunayo said, “Basically what you have seen is that most of those flights that were said to have been sold out were either cancelled or they are not going to operate. So it shows the effect of the new consumer protection software and online reporting process which is now very open.

“So, airlines are being careful not to leave schedules open when they know that they are not going to operate it,” he said.

Ohunayo said ahead of the yuletide, airfares might increase due to the existing capacity constraint.

“Again, we are approaching the December period when more people will begin to travel and flights will go up. We cannot stop the airlines but what I can say is that we have to encourage more competition to allow more licensing of AOC,” he said.

Ohunayo stated that the civil aviation authority must create a new licensing regime to create opportunities for smaller operators.