After over five months and 13 days of closure of the Lagos International Airport to international passengers, the airport has come alive again with the arrival of Middle East Airline aircraft from Beirut.
The airline kicked off the partial resumption of international flights to Nigeria on Saturday 5th September, 2020.
The MEA aircraft was welcomed to the MMIA with a water cannon by the FAAN Rescue and Fire Fighter officials.
On arrival, passengers queued up for arrival facilitation by officials of the Nigeria Immigration Service, NIS and the Port Health Service.
After the usual temperature checks with infrared and thermal scanners, they proceeded to present their passports, visas and their covid-19 PCR test results in printed form, fill the necessary papers and proceeded for stamping of their documents by the NIS.
Speaking on the procedures, the Comptroller NIS MMIA, Abdullahi Usman said the process is seamless, adding that the procedures remained the same.
“The passengers are coming in not emass, the control of the passengers start from the embarkation at the aircraft, we guide them according to their visa status, we are good to go.”
“The procedure remains the same, it has not changed, you fill the arrival form and go straight to the counters and the social distance is there. Nigeria and have no need to fill the arrival card but we still have some information we need from them so we give them small form to fill in there to allow seamless passenger clearance at the counters”, he added.
Expressing joy at the restart, the MMIA Manager, Mrs. Victoria Shinaba said a lot was done by the FAAN Management to ensure the restart was smooth and hitch-free and to boost passengers confidence in air travel.
“We are grateful to God because the airport is coming back to live though after a lot of things were put in place just to ensure that our travelers, number one have confidence in traveling again, them again, we make sure that our airport is safe and secured for travel.”
According to her, during the closure of the terminal to commercial scheduled flights, the airport Catered to many evacuation and special flights approved entry.
She said, 192 evacuation and special flights were recorded while 1,404 cargo flights landed in the airport.
“While airport was still on lockdown, we had some flights, we were able to have 192 passenger flights that evacuations of different and special flights then we had 1,404 cargo flights during the period.”
