Nigeria Gets Helicopter Maintenance Center

The Nigerian Air Force has set up its first indigenous Periodic Depot Maintenance center to take care of its aircrafts and eliminating capital flights.

It says the centre would now take care of its aircrafts indigenously, and thereby eliminating capital flight.

The Air Officer Commanding (AOC), NAF Logistics Command, Air Vice Marshal Sani Ahmed, made this disclosure at the closing ceremony of a two-day Logistics workshop seminar held in Lagos, DailyTrust reported last week. He said the helicopter PDM, the first in the country, will take care of servicing all helicopters of the NAF instead of flying the helicopters abroad for maintenance or bringing in expatriates to fix them, as was obtainable in the past.

Tapping into its local engineering scheme, the NAF seeks to curb capital flight due to the resultant flight of hard earned foreign exchange, while at the same time creating employment and enhancing local capacity.

At the hanger, faulty NAF helicopters will be reactivated by the Aeronautical Engineering and Technical Services Limited (AETSL), a unit of the Nigerian Air Force Holdings Company (NAFHC), in a purely indigenous scheme utilising Air force engineers.