Air Peace Management says it strongly refutes the recent flight disruption report published by the Nigeria Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) for August 2026.
The management of the Airline in a press statement signed by the Chief Operating Officer Oluwatoyin Olajide said the report contains fundamental data inaccuracies regarding the airline’s operational volume and mischaracterizes the root causes of flight delays, unfairly placing the blame on the airline.
The said data failed to reflect the reality of our operations, nor does it accurately contextualize the primary drivers of the operational disruptions experienced during the said month.
“First and foremost, the NCAA report vastly under reported our total flight volume. Air Peace operated a total of 2,564 flights in August 2026, as opposed to the 1,864 flights stated in the NCAA report. By omitting over 700 fully operational flights from the data pool, the NCAA’s calculations skew our actual performance metrics and artificially inflated the reported delay percentages. Most worrisome is, Why did NCAA start the monthly series with August rather than July, immediately following publication of Q1 and Q2 on 31st of July?”
The Airline noted that “it is indeed worriome that there is still no equivalent monthly data located for July, yet NCAA published unusually granular August airline delay data only 13 days after month-end. Unbelievable!
It is reasonable to sugest that the early release of the August’s publication was accompanied by disclosure that the month contained an extraordinary aviation-sector industrial disruption which significantly affected the airline’s operations.
The effect of the August 11th instigated Union disruptions of our operations lingered for over 14days leading to rescheduling, avoidable delays and cancelation of Flights.
Why was this report published rapidly without identifying the causes of the delays attributed to individual airlines instead of publishing wrong figures that could tarnish the reputation of the airline despite prevailing operational challenges?
Furthermore, the characterization of these delays failed to differentiate between internal operational issues and severe ²systemic challenges that are completely outside the airline’s control.
An internal review of our August 2026 flight data performance analysis reveals that *391 flights which is only *15%** *of the delays experienced during the month of August were caused by internal factors.* *The rest of the delays experienced by Air Peace were caused by external factors, **and we have the data to support this.***
From the above, only 391 flights should be attributed to Air Peace which represents 15% of the delay in that month.
The internal delay causal factors were largely as a result of technical issues resulting in unscheduled maintenance on our aircraft and fuel related issues. The major external disruptions are broken down as follows:
*Airport Congestion and Traffic:* Heavy tarmac and traffic congestion accounted for more than 51% of the external delays we experienced. Aircraft were frequently held on the ground or in holding patterns due to infrastructure capacity limits.
*Bird Strikes:* Unpredictable wildlife hazards, specifically bird strikes during takeoff and landing, forced unscheduled aircraft inspections and safety checks, disrupting flight rotations. One of our aircraft 5N-BYG was struck by a bird in Abuja and damaged the inlet cowl beyond acceptable limits costing us USD1.8M to fix the dent. This is an aircraft that operates a minimum of eight sectors a day airlifting about a 1000 paasengers. Unfortunately, the aircraft was removed from Flight operations for more than a week resulting in huge disruptions and only became serviceable after the inlet cowl was replaced.
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*Airport Facilities:** Deficiencies and unexpected breakdowns in airport infrastructure heavily restricted seamless boarding and departure timelines.
*Inclement Weather Conditions:* Unfavorable weather patterns throughout August forced mandatory safety holds and several diversions which further compounded the backlog. It is no longer news that even now, we are still in the raining season. One flight diversion could result in almost three hours delay. How is the consequential delay Air Peace’s fault? Yet, we still take care of the passengers including hotel accommodations for external events that are beyond the airline. This is against industry standard.
*Unprecedented Picketing of the Airline by Aviation Union* members creating disruptions to our Flight operations for over 14 days.
Again, the narrative that Air Peace is primarily responsible for these delays is completely false. The majority of the delays experienced by our passengers were driven by External Factors and completely outside of our control.
In stark contrast, delays caused by internal operational factors accounted for just 15% of the total delays experienced during the month of August.
*We have restrained ourselves from making these facts public before now but we have now been pushed beyond acceptable limits, hence the need to go public and state the facts the way they are.*
Air Peace has heavily invested in its fleet, crew availability, continuous high standard trainings and maintenance protocols. We remain fully committed to safety, on-time performance and passenger satisfaction; however, an airline cannot safely or logistically bypass severe airport congestion/traffic, inadequate airport infrastructure, sunset restrictions or adverse weather conditions. We will continue to optimize our internal processes to mitigate against all the internal delay drivers.
The Airline says it respectfully urges the Nigeria Civil Aviation Authority to review and audit its data collection methods to ensure future reports accurately reflect the correct data and delay causal factors/ operational environment of Nigerian aviation Sector.
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