Nigeria has attained another high level safety rating which places it among the world leaders in aviation safety.
The country climbed to Level 3 State Safety Programme (SSP) Implementation Process supervised by the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO).
Nigeria has therefore joined countries like the United States of America, United Kingdom etc in this echelon.
The director general of the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA), Capt. Muhtar Usman explained that the categorisation is dependent on the International ICAO, which tracks the SSP implementation process of member states via its Integrated Safety Trend Analysis and Reporting System (iSTARS).
Member states in tandem therefore deploy this platform to undertake Gap Analysis, define their action plans and benchmark their progress.
According to ICAO records, only two member states-Australia and Sri Lanka- have achieved full implementation of the SSP.
Usman said Nigeria was striving to achieve Level 4 which is 100 per cent by the end 0f 2017.
The SSP process is inaugurated in member countries in compliance with the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) requirements as contained in Annex 19 on Safety Management.
Consequently, Nigeria’s advanced level has put its SSP implementation process amongst States that have defined an action plan for all non-implemented Gap questions.
In other words, Nigeria has completed its Gap Analysis, implemented 43.6% of the required SSP tasks.
In addition, the country has developed a detailed action plan for the accomplishment of the outstanding tasks with an established and approved timeline.
In pursuant to the above, Nigeria has commenced the implementation of the SSP processes and has achieved several milestones.
These include the completion of the SSP Gap Analysis and the establishment of the Implementation Plan approved by the director general of NCAA.
Other completed SSP tasks are the official authorisation of the director general as the accountable executive of the SSP and the designation of the NCAA as the Placeholder Organization of the SSP in Nigeria by the minister of state for aviation, Senator Hadi Sirika.
The approval and publication of the SSP statement, the enforcement policy in an SSP-SMS environment including Nigeria’s Voluntary and Confidential Reporting System etc, are among the tasks that have been concluded.
The ICAO Aviation Safety Plan (GASP) has recognised the relevance of establishing and maintaining fundamental safety oversight systems as a prerequisite to the full implementation of an SSP.
Member – states with robust safety oversight system have been called upon to progress towards full implementation of State Safety Programme (SSP).
An SSP is an integrated set of regulations and activities aimed at improving aviation safety which will be monitored through Universal Safety Oversight Audit Programme (USOAP) Continuous Monitoring Approach (CMA) after such a state has achieved an Effective Implementation (EI) of over 60 percent.
