The International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) has granted the Regional Centre of Excellence (RCE) status to the Nigerian College of Aviation Technology (NCAT).
The President of the ICAO Council Dr. Olumuyiwa Bernard Aliu, gave the certificate of NCAT’s new status to the Vice President, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo, at the just concluded 3rd ICAO World Aviation Forum (IWAF3).
The ICAO President said NCAT had made significant progress and that the new status would give it the opportunity to train critical manpower in the aviation sector within the West African sub-region and beyond.
Speaking to newsmen on the significance of the award, the Rector of NCAT, Capt. Abdulsalami Mohammed, said the regional training centre status “allows the college to develop training programmes for all ICAO annexes. So we can develop training programmes in aerodromes, air transport, facilitation, environment safety and security. All of them will open windows of opportunity as we can develop these programmes ourselves and anytime someone from any part of the world is interested in the ICAO TrainAir plus, they can utilise these programmes and NCAT gets to benefit because we get paid anytime someone uses our training programmes.”
He also said the status allowed NCAT instructors to conduct training in any part of the world.
He said the journey to attaining the status took a lot of efforts and investment with several layers of inspections from ICAO to ensure the desired standards were met.
“In 2015 we started the process of getting this Regional Training Centre (RTC) status and that required a lot of things, including and not limited to developing extra training packages.
He further explained that at the time NCAT signified interest to go for the RTC, “that was when the criterion was changed, and that they needed the applicant to develop a minimum of three standard training packages; and we had to do that and then train an internal validator. Training of an internal validator meant we had to develop another standard training package. So with that, NCAT was able to satisfy the requirement of being awarded the RTC status.”
He also said NCAT had the capacity to function as RTC. “We have the capacity, we have the plans to increase that capacity because by being an RTC opens a lot of opportunities for NCAT as there will be a lot of training at NCAT and it will improve the requirement that we need to keep this status.”
