British Airways Grounds Its Entire 31 Boeing 747 Over Losses
British Airways has grounded its entire 31 Boeing 747s as a result of sharp travel downturn. The UK airline is the world’s largest operator of the jumbo jets, which it first flew in 1989.
Spokesman of the Airways said today, July 17: “it is with great sadness that we can confirm we are proposing to retire our entire 747 fleet with immediate effect.”
“It is unlikely our magnificent ‘queen of the skies’ will ever operate commercial services for British Airways again due to the downturn in travel caused by the Covid-19 global pandemic.” .
The British Airways, which is owned by International Airlines Group (IAG), currently has 31 747s in its fleet. They will all be retired with immediate effect. It had planned on retiring the planes in 2024 but has brought forward the date due to the downturn.
The British carrier added it will operate more flights on modern, more fuel-efficient planes such as its new Airbus A350s and Boeing 787 Dreamliners. It expects them to help it achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.
Boeing’s 747 helped democratise global air travel in the 1970s, and marked its 50-year flying anniversary in February 2019.
US-based Boeing signalled the end of the plane’s production a year ago.
A wave of restructuring triggered by the virus outbreak is hitting airlines across the world, along with plane-makers and their suppliers. Thousands of job losses and furloughs have been announced in recent weeks.
Hundreds of BA ground staff face redundancy as the airline slashes costs in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.
Airlines across the world have been hit hard by coronavirus-related travel restrictions.
Source: BBC.
One Nwonu Emmanuel has allegedly confessed to the police that he broke into the St. Patrick Catholic Church in Abakaliki, the capital of the Ebonyi State, broke the offering box and took the sum of N41, 465.00 from it.
Help is on the way for private schools, hotels, and road transport workers among others, as the Federal Government had factored them in the stimulus package it has put in place for Micro Small and Medium Enterprises to cushion the effect of coronavirus pandemic.
The National Assembly Service Commission (NASC) has issued a query to the embattled Clerk of the National Assembly, Mohammed Ataba Sani Omolori, for his failure to proceed on retirement. The query is dated today, July 16 and was signed by the chairman of the commission, Ahmed Amshi.
Bother President Muhammadu Buhari and Senate President, Ahmed Ibrahim Lawan, have cautioned ministers and other appointees of the President against causing unnecessary frictions between the executive and the legislature.
Corruption in the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) is getting messier as the acting Managing Director Prof. Kemebradikumo Pondei, accused the chairman of the House of Representatives Committee on the Commission investigating its activities, Olubumi Tunji-Ojo (APC-Ondo) of corrupt practices.
Scrap This Bureau Of Corruption Called NDDC, By Fredrick Nwabufo
What is happening in the NDDC is a big whale feast — with indiscriminate and soulless butchering of the agency’s treasury. Nigerians in the Niger Delta asked for development, but they were sectioned to endure pauperisation and the purloining of their patrimony. They asked for guardians of the public till, but they were handed hunters of the common wealth.
The NDDC was established on June 5, 2000 as a response to the agitations of the Niger Delta for development. But despite the huge chest of resources allocated to this commission over the years, it has failed prodigiously to bring the barest minimum of development to the region.
With an annual budget of about N300 billion, the NDDC has nourished the flatulent entrails of the behemoth of sleaze while the region it was meant to take care of atrophied. There is perhaps no agency of the government that has remained unaccountable and opaque with its operations like this commission. The agency is the proverbial ‘’regional cake’’ where governors from the south-south and other interests ogle to take a slice.
The Niger Delta is one of the most disadvantaged regions in the country in terms human, infrastructural and material development. Less than 30 percent of the natives have access to clean water. Poverty blooms in the villages and creeks which are marooned from any form of modernity. The region plods away in illiteracy and disease as basic sanitary system, schools and health care are only a pipe dream.
This is a region which is the breadwinning spouse of the country. 90 percent of the country’s revenue comes from the region. Between 1965 and 2000, Nigeria earned over $350 billion from crude oil – according to the International Monetary Fund. Also, an audit report by Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI) in 2018 showed that Nigeria earned as much as $677.9 billion in 18 years, between 1999 and 2016, from the sale of crude oil. But why is the country’s goose hungry; raped and tortured?
I must say, the Niger Delta is a victim of its thieving elite who appropriate and expropriate resources meant for the people to themselves. The region must, as a matter of urgency, rejig and nozzle its agitation to the enemies within.
In October 2019, President Muhammadu Buhari ordered a forensic audit of the operations of the commission from 2001 to 2019. He said the current fortunes of the Niger Delta do not justify the vast resources that have been funnelled into the commission. He was right.
“I try to follow the Act setting up these institutions, especially the NDDC. With the amount of money that the federal government has religiously allocated to the NDDC, we will like to see the results on the ground; those that are responsible for that have to explain certain issues. The projects said to have been done must be verifiable. You just cannot say you spent so much billions and when the place is visited, one cannot see the structures that have been done,’’ he said.
Really, the president’s decision to audit the NDDC is an intrepid quest. I doubt if any other administration took the initiative to look through the iron shield of the agency’s operations. But I am sceptical about the outcome of this adventure. My reason is simple. The current management of the NDDC overseeing the audit has been alleged to be flunkeys of Godswill Akpabio, minister of Niger Delta affairs, who himself has been accused of complicity in the contract fraud at the agency.
The allegations of Joy Nunieh, former acting managing director of the NDDC, against Akpabio are thick and cannot be discounted. Inasmuch as I think the audit process is already tainted, I believe it should be done still. But I strongly believe we need to reconsider the purpose of the NDDC. It has failed to achieve what it was set up to accomplish.
Do we keep feeding the beast?
Twitter: @FredrickNwabufo