The Federal Government has fined crew of a UK based charter airline Flairjet N500,000 each for violating Nigerian Civil Aviation Regulations.
Minister of Aviation Senator Hadi Sirika who disclosed this on his official twitter handle says, the maximum penalty is N500,000.00 fined each of the crew.
“Flairjet were found to violate our Civil Aviation Regulations IS 1.3.3(a) Table 2(lV) and IS 1.3.3(a) Table 2 (Vll) (4).” Sen Sirika stated.
According to him, “We caused them to pay and reported their callous misdemeanour to the UK CAA, MFA and the UK High Commission.
The aircraft belonging to Flairjet, an Embraer Legacy 600 with registration number G-PRFX was impounded on the 17th of March, 2020 for violation of general Aviation flight Operations.
The company was given approvals for humanitarian operations but regrettably, they were caught conducting commercial flights, the crew were interrogated and taken to an isolation centre in Lagos and quarantined for 14 days.
The Minister of Aviation had first made the revelation on Monday during a briefing by the Presidential Task Force on COVID-19 in Abuja.
The minister in his statement then, had corrected that the company’s name is Flairjet as against Flair Aviation that he announced on Sunday via Twitter.
He had said, “There is a company called Flairjet. I want to apologise that I tweeted in the afternoon (on Sunday) when the fasting was biting harder and we verified this as Flair Aviation. The correct name is Flairjet and it is a UK registered company. “They have an aircraft, Legacy 600, and the registration number of the aircraft is GPRFX.
Their business address is Business Aviation Centre, Terminal Road, Birmingham International Airport, West Midlands and their code is B26QN.
“This company applied severally as to operate humanitarian flights and we did approve. It is very clear at the beginning of this exercise that we defined what those flights should be: essential flights basically – cargo, medical evacuation, medical supplies, and so on and so forth.
“Unfortunately, this company decided to become commercial in their service, charging money and flying people in and out. “In the first place, the whole essence of a lockdown is to ensure there is no movement of persons freely because this COVID-19 we are all spending sleepless nights for happened because somebody travelled abroad. So, we believe this shouldn’t happen,” he had said.