For Arik Air to come back to full operations, the management of the carrier needs to clean the Agean stable as they would require N10 billion to do so.

This was the view of the new Managing Director of the airline, Capt. Roy Ukpebo Ilegbodu adding that the Assets Management Corporation of Nigeria (AMCON) has discovered deep rooted rot at Arik Airlines, which will require over N10billion to fix before the largest local carrier would resume full and uninterrupted flight operations to its regular routes across the country and beyond.

 The airline was on Thursday taken over by the Federal Government under the auspices of AMCON as a result of a whooping debt profile of over N300billion.

 He said the situation is so bad that only nine aircraft out of the 30 in the fleet of the airline is operational, stressing that  21 of them have either been grounded or gone for C-checks in Europe among other forms of challenges.

  As if these problems are not enough, he disclosed that the airline does not have money to procure aviation fuel for the nine operational aircraft because no dealer wants to sell aviation fuel to Arik if it is not on cash-and-carry basis.

He called for public understanding because flight schedules may be re-aligned based on the nine aircraft that are available, technically sound and ready for flight operation.