Anyone who is remotely acquainted with or involved in the state of reasonable air transport would concede that it has been an abject mess ever since but Barbados’ withdrawal from LIAT leading to the repossession of planes and the shrinking of a mainstay carrier into a one-plane operation out of Antigua.
Airline schedules, from Guyana in the south to the Leeward Islands in the north, have been wrecked, and the arrival of three airlines into the regional airspace has done nothing to improve this sorry state of affairs.
For a recent regional workshop, no one from Grenada could attend because the only flights available would route them through Miami. No one from St. Vincent and the Grenadines could make it – their flights would see them being routed through London. Participants from a neighbouring island roughly 50 miles or half-an-hour’s flying time away had to arrive via British Airways. Planning to get into and out of each island has become a complex, military-style, logistical operation merely because airlines have inconvenient days of arrival and departure, their seats are invariably sold out weeks in advance, and relative comfort and convenience have been sacrificed on the altar of profit.
The notion that inter-Island air transport must be the sole preserve of profit-making entities is as bizarrely unproductive for the region as the same assumption for public transport in each island. In developing countries, transport cannot be considered as purely private goods.
Just as lengthy commute times are a trademark of reduced productivity, sluggish output and lax revenue in any local economy, so too does the regional economy suffer when one-day trips must become four-day excursions and a flight from one island to another becomes a game of hopscotch involving three.
There is more than enough blame to share among regional governments for the shambolic schedules: the intransigence of one government unwilling to trim its labour force to suit the airline’s operations is matched by another island’s bull-headed notion that it should not be involved in civil aviation at all.
We repeat: Caribbean transport cannot work entirely as a private sector playground. Contrary to rosy expectations spawned by LIAT’s wrecking of increased competition, greater choice and lower fares, we have airlines charging double and triple what they used to for a trip from one island to another.
For Caribbean people to enjoy the community to which they belong, they must spend more money than it would take to travel three or four hours to North America. To this reality, an economist previously posited that given our small size, we ought not to expect low airfares. In a region-wide telecast on the subject of airfares, this economist’s dose of economic realism came up against the bullish desire of the then Secretary General of the Caribbean Tourism Organization and his own economic pragmatism: if you lower fares you will get more bums on seats.
That economist clearly missed the boat. Should exponentially higher airfares be the price for doing business, getting education, visiting friends and family, engaging in commerce, deepening participation in our cultures and spreading the glue that keeps these desperate islands together as a single economic space and polity?
Caribbean governments have long shown great disdain for their own people travelling to the region, giving lie to their rhetoric. For example, these governments routinely pay subsidies to North American carriers to bring sun-seeking tourists to sun-drenched shores but steadfastly refuse to invest in regional air linkages that would expose even more of those same tourists to a wider choice of destinations or multiple destinations in one trip.
Antigua and Barbuda, the sole designated survivor as the remaining shareholder of LIAT last week became the latest to adopt a for-profit stance to keep LIAT going, by calling on Caribbean governments to do for it what it has long done for others.
What St. John’s is urging fellow CARICOM nations to do is act in the spirit and letter of the treaty they signed nearly 40 years ago. After all, they all agreed never to offer terms and conditions of service to third party countries that are superior to those offered to fellow member states. It is now time to stop violating the Treaty of Chaguaramas, thwarting the dreams and hopes of Caribbean people and stunting their own development and growth. They must abandon ages-old mistrust and suspicion of each other by setting a new course for Caribbean aviation, in which agreements are honoured, not breached.
Caribbean aviation has been reduced through the management of decline and our own government must acknowledge its role in bringing about the current state of affairs. But it will require collective action to return to what now appears to have been a golden age of inter-island aviation.
We never knew we had it so good until we lit the match and burned down our own barn. Rather than poke about the embers, it is time to rebuild that structure, not depend on others to do it for us, and throw off the shackles of economic orthodoxy that have left a regional industry in shambles.
