The Nigerian federal government said plans have reached an advanced stage for German airline, Lufthansa, to make Nigeria a hub of its operations in the West African sub-region.
Babatunde Omotoba, Nigeria's minister of Aviation disclosed this at the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) Forum in Abuja on Wednesday, adding that a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) had already been signed between both countries.
He said the focus of that MOU is to make Nigeria a hub by Lufthansa.
"What they want to do is to increase the number of flights that they will do into Abuja and then they will be able to partner with our local airlines to distribute the passengers for them," he said.
"We have now granted them the right to fly seven flights into Abuja from Frankfurt and they have promised to start this by October/November," the minister said.
According to him, there will be four flights from Frankfurt-Abuja-Port Harcourt on a weekly basis and three flights from Frankfurt-Abuja-Malabo.
"We have seven flights, four of them will stop over in Port Harcourt, three of them will branch in Malabo but seven of them will drop passengers in Abuja and then take passengers from Abuja," he added.
He said this compared favorably to the current three flights being operated from Malabo to Abuja and which would wait for about45 minutes in Malabo before coming back to Abuja to drop and pick passengers and then return to Malabo.
Omotoba said that in Malabo, passengers would wait for another 45 minutes for the airlines to board Malabo passengers before flying to Frankfurt.
"So a journey of five hours for Nigerians ends up becoming eight hours and we don't like that and of course when you look at the number of people in the aircraft, 95 percent are coming to Nigeria," he said.
On the construction of a maintenance hangar in Nigeria, Omotoba pointed out that Lufthansa Technique was still in the process of discussing with a private sector investor in Nigeria.
He said Nigeria's role in the construction of the hangar was to provide a safe environment and to ensure that documents were processed as quickly as possible.
Source:Xinhua
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