TheCable

Allen Onyema, chief executive officer of Air Peace, has advised other airlines in the industry to consider eliminating inflight services during short-distance flights.

Speaking during a webinar organised by Aelex Partners on Thursday, Onyema said the airline will downsize its operations by 60 percent when flight operations resume.

He advised local airlines to emulate American airlines who only serve water on similar flights.

“Now we are doing short flights in Nigeria, a 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, the time has come for Nigerian airlines to stand up and stand firm,” he said.

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

“I think Nigerian airlines should stop serving food. In America, two hours flight they don’t serve anything, they give you water.

“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.”

The webinar was themed ‘Survival Strategies for Nigerian Airlines’.

Giving details of the downsizing, Onyema said: “Out of our 13 Boeing 737 in Air Peace aircraft, we are only going to deploy four, out of our 8 ERJ’s, we are going to deploy only six because those ones are just 50-seater, so we will manage with those ones”.

“From 100 flights per day, Air Peace is going down to 42 flights. So, we are downsizing our operations to almost about 60 percent, we are going to do about 40 percent of our operations and even in that 40 percent, we are not going to carry 40 percent of the passengers we use to carry before.

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

The CEO, however, assured that the airline would not sack any of its staff as they would be called to resume as operations expand.

The aviation industry has been one of the worst-hit by the COVID-19 pandemic and several foreign airlines have begun to lay off staff in order to stay afloat.