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Lagos Domestic Airport Records 228,239 Passengers For December 2018

Of the 228,239 passengers recorded within the period, inbound passengers stood at 104,168, while outbound passengers were 124,071.

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The General Aviation Terminal (GAT) of the Murtala Muhammed Airport (MMA), Lagos, recorded 228,239 passengers in December 2018, thereby maintaining its status as the busiest domestic airport in the country.

Of the 228,239 passengers recorded within the period, inbound passengers stood at 104,168, while outbound passengers were 124,071.

The statistics is, however, not inclusive of the Murtala Muhammed Airport Two (MMA2), Lagos, which is controlled by Bi-Courtney Aviation Services Limited (BASL).

The statistics was made available by Adekunle Aderibigbe, the Terminal Manager of GAT.

Aderibigbe noted that before the festive season, the management of the terminal took several measures aimed at ensuring seamless passenger facilitation by servicing the conveyor belts, cooling systems and screening machines. He said the upsurge in passenger traffic was envisaged, hence it worked towards seamless movement for passengers, while some flights were moved to a less busy terminal for easy passenger facilitation.

“We have two terminals here, the Zulu and Alfa. What we did was to move some flights from the busy terminal to the less busy terminal for passengers' comfort. Calabar, Port Harcourt and Uyo flights were moved to the Zulu terminal to ease the Alfa traffic where Air Peace operates from,” he said.

According to Aderibigbe, the Agege motor road construction work almost marred free flow of traffic at the airport, as the construction work had a spill-over, which affected domestic airport users. He, however, noted that it was carefully handled by officials of the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN) at the terminal end.

“The only challenge was the construction work on the Agege motor road, as passengers found it difficult to to move out of the terminal to connect to Agege motor road. The traffic extended to the terminal and passengers expressed bitter experiences during the Yuletide period,” he said.

The terminal manager also revealed that the automation of the domestic car park by FAAN early last year brought sanity to the area as some people who were not travellers took undue advantage of the non-automation of the park to leave their vehicles there. He said with the billing system introduced, the number of vehicles at the park had gradually reduced through proper monitoring.

While acknowledging the small size of the domestic car park, he explained further that there was a plan by FAAN management to construct a new multi-storey car park at the domestic wing, noting that when completed, it would ensure decongestion of traffic at the terminal.

He said the activities of touts had been reduced at the airport, with various arrests made on a daily basis by FAAN security personnel, and warned that anyone caught engaging in such illicit activities within the airport would be apprehended and handed over to law enforcement agents.

He expressed appreciation to the management of FAAN for the evacuation order that led to the removal of all abandoned aircraft from the tarmac, which he said had created enough space at the domestic end of the tarmac.