Chairman of Airline company, Air Peace, Allen Onyema has announced to the general public that it has been named as Nigeria’s official flag carrier.
He made this information available to newsmen at the Enugu Economic Summit.
The chairman said the airline will operate direct flights to China.
Onyema also highlighted the economic benefits, with the coming of this airline. He said the airline will aid Nigerian businessmen that have business in China who have had to spend more than necessary by taking connecting flights to London, Paris and Amsterdam before they can get to China.
“The government and the flying public created a yearning gap, all the agreements in this country is tilted to one side, the foreign airlines but this government of Muhammadu Buhari has started to do things differently – recognising the local airlines and seeing that in Air Peace there is a lot of quality, so they decided to give us – when we applied it didn’t take time before they gave it to us,” said Onyema.
“I made the application, they made their investigations and they know what Air Peace stands for, so it was very easy for the government to give us the permit to fly as a flag carrier for the country.”
Onyema said: “I’m going to create a hub of a kind that has never been formed in this country and I am going to use my domestic airline to service the hub.”
“There is no other airline doing China direct, this is the first time any airline for the whole of [the] West African sub-region and central Africa will have a direct flights to China – we saw that gap and we decided to plug it,” he said.
“At times, businesses are guided by the motives behind those businesses, I didn’t come all out because of profit, I just wanted to create jobs but at the same time, I don’t want to lose my investments.”
“The airport has the capacity, they are building a new international terminal so I think it has the capacity to do it, to carry, [this] traffic but now it’s time for them to start looking at the hotels they have, try to improve them.”
