Background: Encroachments and unauthorized structures around airport boundaries represent a persistent and growing safety threat at Nigerian civil aviation aerodromes, where rapid urban expansion, inadequate land use planning coordination, and limited regulatory enforcement capacity combine to allow encroachment proliferation within the protected airspace surfaces defined by ICAO Annex 14 obstacle limitation surface standards. The absence of a structured framework for encroachment detection, evidence documentation, risk assessment, and multi-agency enforcement coordination leaves aerodrome operators and civil aviation regulatory inspectors without the systematic methodology necessary to address encroachment hazards efficiently and with the regulatory defensibility required for successful enforcement actions
Methods: This paper proposes a comprehensive Encroachment Management Framework that integrates systematic aerodrome boundary and obstacle limitation surface survey methodology, risk-tiered encroachment classification, evidence documentation protocols meeting the evidentiary standards required for formal regulatory enforcement and legal proceedings, and multi-agency coordination protocols for encroachment removal involving the Nigeria Civil Aviation Authority, state urban and regional planning authorities, state ministry of works, and law enforcement agencies with jurisdiction over aerodrome buffer zones
Results: The Encroachment Management Framework provides aerodrome operators and NCAA regulatory inspectors with a structured workflow for identifying, classifying, documenting, and pursuing corrective action for encroachments across all Nigerian aerodrome classes, from international gateway airports with complex obstacle limitation surface profiles to domestic aerodromes where the absence of formal buffer zone designations creates enforcement challenges that the framework addresses through alternative evidentiary approaches
Conclusion: The Encroachment Management Framework advances NCAA encroachment oversight capability from reactive inspection findings toward systematic surveillance-based encroachment lifecycle management, with the regulatory enforcement defensibility and multi-agency coordination architecture necessary for effective encroachment removal in the complex institutional environment of Nigerian urban and peri-urban aerodrome boundary zones