Ms. Ajufo said that night, she rung this number timelessly and did not get a reply. She said this frustrated her, because she had an important meeting to attend at about 12:45 pm and the cancellation meant she would miss it.

“It seemed that Aero was bent on frustrating me,” Ms. Ajufo said

“When I finally got to the airport on the morning of my flight, I was told that I could be booked on the 2pm flight”.

Ms Ajufo said she reluctantly agreed, but alas, the worst had not showed up for her because she said that again, Aero moved the 2pm flight to 5:20 pm.

“To make matters worse, there were no Aero employees at the terminal providing information, the only Aero staff were at boarding gates and gave vague responses such as your flight is going to go”.

Ms Ajufo said this went on till about 10pm when finally someone from Aero came down; narrating her ordeal with Aero, Ms, Ajufo said that the passengers whose flight were scheduled to take off at 11:15 suddenly picked up energy as they ran in competition with fellow passengers to catch the only available flight at about 10:30 pm.

“We had to run from gate to gate as suddenly, we were told that there were two sets of passengers and only one flight.”

“I don’t know what became of the other passengers, but we landed in Abuja a few minutes shy of midnight and had to make the journey into Abuja at an ungodly hour”.

The encounters of these ladies are not the only sour stories from the Aero Contractor’s clients.

In September, some passengers, over 20 of them expressed anger at what they called the insensitivity of the staff of the company.

These passengers arrived at the Nigeria Airforce Base, Port Harcourt Airport, and were supposed to leave for Warri, but had their flights cancelled.

Some of the passengers complained that their flight to Warri had been cancelled two consecutive days within the week for no clear reason.

A large number of them said they just got messages saying that their flights were cancelled for operational reason.

They said that the company did not even bother to make alternative plans for them.

Some also said that they were heavily counting their losses due to the cancellations of flight.

When IQ4News contacted Aero Contractors over the recent spate of cancellation of flights, Captain Akin George, the Managing Director of Aero Contractors had this to say:

“Aero regrets any inconvenience suffered by our customers due to flight delays or cancellation. Passengers have the option of rebooking for another flight or claiming their refunds. Most times they do not have the patience to wait for the process of the refund to be completed, especially when it is a full flight. Some of them purchase tickets from other airlines and process their refunds at a later date. Being a safety conscious carrier, Aero will only fly when it is safe and secure.”

According to Ms. Ajufo who strongly disagreed with Captain George, “it is surprising that the captain will speak this way, the day my flight was cancelled, the staff of Aero were very rude to us the passengers. We waited for about twelve hours to get a refund”.

Ms. Ajufo said some of the passengers who had extremely important meeting to attend to, had to go and catch other flights.

She said if these were the passengers that Captain George referred to as impatience, then Aero was lacking a sense of customer responsibility.

While Aero Contractors grapple with proper scheduling of their flights and by so doing causing intense inconvenience to the passengers; the passengers continually resound that Aero has become customer insensitive.

As Ms. Ajufo puts it - “Oh, did I mention that after keeping us from morning till night, they still had what I can only call a serious lack of empathy as they sold drinks on board? One would think that if you kept men women and children all day with no news, the least you could do was give them a coke and a packet of biscuit.”

Ms. Amah concurring with this, said “things would have been a lot easier to take if the Aero staff were more friendly, what with some of them saying to us ‘be grateful if your flight takes off today.’”