Air Peace dismisses Ebola fears following Barbados landing

Nigerian airline Air Peace’s Chief commercial officer Nowel Ngala is seeking to allay fears of Ebola virus exposure, assuring the public that the carrier does not operate flights to affected areas and is adhering to intensified screening protocols established in response to the outbreak. 

The airline made a historic landing at the Grantley Adams International Airport on Sunday, becoming the first direct flight from Nigeria to Barbados. However, concerns were raised following reports of Ebola cases in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda. 

Seeking to address those concerns, Ngala said: “We are 100 per cent safe. The government of Nigeria together with the National Aviation Authority have put in place drastic measures at all of the entry airports in Nigeria to control and scan passengers arriving from destinations affected by the Ebola virus.”

The official reiterated that  Air Peace does not fly into any of the affected destinations, noting that its passengers are mostly from Ghana and Lagos [Nigeria’s largest city] into the Caribbean.

“We continue to scrutinize our passengers, and we did not come with any passengers concerning the Ebola and we will continue to work with both governments and all markets in the Caribbean to build traffic from here into Nigeria,” he said.

Ngala also said the decision to end the airline’s flight in Barbados rather than continue to Antigua was driven by low passenger numbers and cost considerations.

Speaking to journalists on Monday during the official launch at the Hotel Indigo, he said: “Our original flight schedule was for Lagos, Barbados and Antigua and our decision to end the flight in Barbados was strictly a commercial decision based on the passenger load. When we looked at the loads before the flights we realized that we had just 24 passengers flying into Antigua and getting out of Antigua we had just one.”

He added: “There is still a lot of work to be done on the ground to drive the inbound traffic from the Caribbean back into Nigeria and central Africa. We made a conscious decision to end the flight in Barbados because of cost reasons. We understand that the fuel prices are extremely high and so landing a [Boeing] 777 to just uplift one passenger would not have made any economic sense.”

Commending the “level of rigour and scrutiny undertaken by the Ministry of Health as we were coming into Barbados”, High Commissioner to Nigeria, Ghana and Liberia, Juliette Bynoe-Sutherland, reminded the public that there were no cases of the virus in Nigeria.

High Commissioner to Nigeria, Ghana and Liberia, Juliette Bynoe-Sutherland. (JB)

“The Democratic Republic of Congo where the cases are and a few in Uganda are thousands of miles away and situated in East Africa. The flights are coming from West Africa, from Nigeria and Lagos. There are no cases of Ebola reported in Nigeria or in Ghana,” she said. 

“All of the countries in Africa are obviously on high alert because of the nature of how diseases of this nature are spread but the entire globe has had the experience of COVID and I say that we can learn from that experience.”