FAAN mulls car park for premier airport terminal, GAT

From Suleiman Idris, Lagos

The Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN) is set to construct a new multi storey car park at the foremost airport terminal in Nigeria, the domestic terminal one of the Murtala Muhammad Airport MMA referred to as General Aviation Terminal (GAT) in Lagos.
The facility when completed will cater for the decongestion of traffic at the terminal as a result of the small size of the area available for car park at the Nigerian premier airport terminal.
Terminal Manager (TM) MMA, Mr. Aderigbigbe Adekunle told journalists in Lagos that GAT also attained a pole position in passengers passage last December with a record of 228, 239.
Statistic made available showed an inbound figure of 104,168 passengers and 124,071 outbound passengers were processed out during the period.
The terminal management team took measures aimed at ensuring seamless passenger facilitation by servicing the conveyor belts, cooling systems and screening machines before the yuletide. He told journalists.
Flights were also diverted to less busy terminal at the airport to ease passenger’s facilitation following the envisaged increase in traffic.
“We have two terminals here, the Zulu and Alfa, what we did was to move some flights from the busy terminal to the less busy terminal for passengers comfort. Calabar, Port Harcourt and Uyo flights were moved to the Zulu terminal to ease the Alfa traffic where Air Peace operates from” explained.
Mr. Adekunle attributed construction works on the Agege motor road as an impediment free flow of traffic around the airport environment as traffic spilled over into domestic airport, a situation professionally managed by FAAN officials.
He said “The only challenge was the construction work on the Agege motor road, passengers find it difficult to move out of the terminal to connect to Agege motor road. The traffic extended to the terminal and passengers expressed bitter experience during the Yuletide period”
The Terminal Manager also revealed that the automation of the domestic car park by FAAN early last year brought sanity to the area as some people who were not travellers took undue advantage of the non automation of the park to leave their vehicles there.
He said with the billing system introduced, the number of vehicles at the park had gradually reduced through proper monitoring.
He commended FAAN for the evacuation order that led to the removal of all abandoned aircraft from the tarmac which has created enough space at the domestic end of the tarmac.