Planning permit lead times across West Africa

Figures are drawn from the published sources listed at the end of this article. Permit lead times are indicative and set by each civil aviation authority.

The gap between filed and approved

Most delayed international movements in the region are not delayed by aircraft, crew or weather. They are delayed because a landing or overflight permit was filed on time but approved late — and the two are not the same event. Filing is an action a flight support team controls. Approval is a decision another organisation makes, on its own calendar, in its own working hours, using its own definition of a complete submission.

The practical consequence is that lead time cannot be treated as a single number. It is the sum of the time an authority needs to review a complete file, the time your own team needs to assemble that file, and the time lost to any round trip caused by a missing element. The third component is the one most schedules ignore, and it is the one that most often decides whether a trip departs.

What actually consumes the clock

When a permit slips, the cause is usually mundane and repeatable. Understanding the failure pattern is more useful than memorising nominal timelines, which vary by state, by aircraft category and by the purpose of the flight.

• Documents that arrive in sequence rather than as a set, so the review restarts each time something new lands.
• An operator or aircraft detail that does not match across the application, the certificate and the flight plan.
• Charter or non-scheduled purpose descriptions that are too vague to be assessed against the state's own approval categories.
• Requests submitted into a channel the authority no longer monitors, or outside its working hours, with no acknowledgement chased.
• Route changes made after submission that quietly invalidate an approval already granted.
• Public holidays and weekend coverage that differ from the operator's own calendar.

Plan backwards from approval, not forwards from filing

The discipline that removes most of this risk is simple: set the approval milestone first, then work backwards to the date the complete file must exist. That single change converts permits from a task list into a schedule with dependencies, which is what they have always been.

For a multi-leg movement, do this per leg and per authority. A trip that touches four states has four independent clocks, and the earliest departure is governed by the slowest of them — not by an average. Where a leg crosses a state that requires additional clearance for the purpose of the flight, that leg sets the critical path for the whole itinerary.

Build the file once, correctly

A standing document pack removes the most common cause of resubmission. The exact contents depend on the state and the operation, but the principle holds: everything that will not change between trips should be current, consistent and immediately available, so that only trip-specific detail is assembled under time pressure.

Consistency matters as much as completeness. Registration formats, operator legal names, insured values and aircraft serial numbers should read identically across every document in the pack. A mismatch that a human reader would forgive is still a mismatch that stops an automated or checklist-driven review.

Escalation is part of the plan, not a reaction to failure

Every filed request should have three things attached before anyone needs them: an acknowledgement expectation, a named follow-up point, and a decision time at which the trip moves to its fallback. Without the third, teams keep waiting past the point where a fallback was still possible.

A fallback is not a cancellation. It is usually an alternate routing that avoids the open approval, a different technical stop, a revised departure slot, or a phased movement that carries the time-critical portion first. Those options are cheap to hold in advance and expensive to invent at short notice.

How we work it

At Earotine, permit work is treated as an operational discipline with owners and deadlines rather than correspondence. Each leg has an approval milestone, a complete file assembled before submission, a monitored acknowledgement, and a defined point at which we recommend the fallback routing to the client.

The measure of success is not how quickly a permit was filed. It is whether the movement departed on the day it was promised, with the approvals in hand and nothing to explain afterwards.