The International Civil Aviation Organisation, the United Nations agency that promotes order in civil aviation globally, has granted approval to Nigeria’s Accident Investigation Bureau for the digitalisation of accident investigation reporting.

Commissioner/Chief Executive Officer, AIB, Akin Olateru, disclosed this while speaking on the side-lines of a two-day industry engagement on the review of accident reports organised by the bureau in Abuja.

He noted that the method of reporting accidents in thesis and hundreds of pages of documents was becoming outdated as operators often found it tough to read such reports.

“What we are trying to do is to challenge the status quo, to actually find a better way of getting this to the public. You have this 300-page report on safety recommendations and all that and by the end of the day people don’t read it,” he stated.

Olateru added, “So what we are trying to do is to digitalise in a graphic way, with a database to see how we can report these same word documents that we’ve produced. We want to see how we can put it in a graphic digital format.”

The AIB boss said the bureau would get the system running before the end of this year, as the initiative had been endorsed by the ICAO.

He said, “We are going to be doing that very soon and with this it makes it very simple for the airlines to read and for anybody of interest to go to a particular section, rather than flipping through pages of documents.

“This has been discussed in the highest level in ICAO and it’s been accepted and by the time we are done, Nigeria will be the first country in the world that will come up with this format.

“That is what I meant by saying that Nigeria will lead the world very soon in terms of accident investigation reporting system.”

Asked to speak on when the bureau would deliver on this, Olateru replied, “We are going through the procurement stage and before the end of the year that will come up to stage.”

He said the bureau was making a lot of investment in the initiative, adding that Saudi Arabia had shown interest in partnering the AIB on the project.

Olateru said, “We will have a platform whereby airlines and stakeholders will subscribe and then have access to it and use it to train pilots, engineers and other players.

“But there will be a nominal fee because AIB wants to use this as an opportunity to generate IGR (Internally Generated Revenue).”

He further stated that the bureau was partnering other agencies in Nigeria’s civil aviation space to establish an Aviation Safety Centre that would serve as a platform where all stakeholders would have access to air accident reports.