Passengers stranded as airlines cut domestic flights

The shortage of aircraft in the domestic airline market has worsened, limiting available flights for passengers, findings by Daily Trust have shown.

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

The busiest routes, Lagos-Abuja and Abuja-Lagos, were hugely impacted as many passengers could not secure seats as of 4pm yesterday.

Checks by our correspondent on the airlines indicated that none of them had seats on any of their Lagos-Abuja flights.

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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.

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

An airline operator, who spoke with our correspondent, 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 who spoke on the condition of anonymity 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.”

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 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.

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