BWIA – Caribbean Airlines’ saving grace

.The Arthur Lok Jack committee to decide on the future of BWIA had succeeded in convincing Prime Minister Patrick Manning the best thing to do with the BWIA brand was to crash it and replace it with a brand new airline, free from all debts, nagging unions and mounting losses. That airline was to be known as Caribbean Airlines Limited.

This brand new and unencumbered carrier, with a large as life humming bird perched on its tail, would usher in a new era in regional aviation – another wholly owned airline of oil rich Trinidad and Tobago.

On January 01 2007, mere hours after the last BWIA flight had landed at Piarco, the new Caribbean Airlines, with an injection of 250 million of taxpayers’ dollars, with a substantial fuel hedge to boot, and a boast that it was not a successor airline to BWIA, took to the tropical skies, using all of BWIA’s aircraft and assets and some retained personnel, complete with the BW code prefacing its flight numbers, all retrieved from the now dead BWIA.

To put it another way, Trinidadians and Tobagonians went to bed On Old Year’s night with their airline as BWIA, but awoke on New Year’s morning with their airline as Caribbean Airlines. New Year; New Airline. The only thing had changed was the name. Everything else remained the same. The biggest losers - a large number of dedicated and loyal employees thrown on the breadline.

To the travelling public the change did not seem to make any difference. They continued to support the national airline. But to the thousands who were sent home and the hundreds who were rehired on short term contracts, the wine was truly bitter medicine. During the first few months of CAL’s operations the name BWIA was a profanity at Piarco. The former workers were treated like strangers. All the perks given retirees were severed. There is still some lingering contention about shares held by displaced employees of BWIA, some of which were bought and some which formed part of severance packages. Former workers have died waiting on a resolution.

So after 66 years of faithful service to the Caribbean and a safety record envied by airlines all over the world, the BWIA brand was put to rest in 2006, only to be resurrected four and a half years later following a serious landing accident in Guyana when CAL lost a B-737-800NG aircraft, which split in two after overshooting the runway and ending up nose down in a ravine.

Suddenly BWIA’s 66-year-old safety record became part of the story and everywhere, everyone was talking about CAL’s decades-long enviable safety record. But CAL has only been flying for four and a half years, so can anyone explain how CAL has a safety record going back 70 years?

Disingenuously, aviation officials, government officials and CAL executives, in their over zealousness to protect the CAL brand in their praises, had no qualms in merging the BWIA safety record with that of the brand new national airline.

BWIA was pulled suddenly from its resting place when at 1.30 a.m. on Saturday July 30, 2011, on a Guyana airstrip, an accident involving a CAL B-737 aircraft shattered the long standing, unblemished safety record of BWIA causing a Sunday morning (not Easter) resurrection of this country’s beloved BWIA. It had now become the saving grace for the brand new Caribbean Airlines.

So, try as they might to bury BWIA, over the past four and a half years, the new CAL is now forced to latch on tightly to BWIA’s record to assist in putting the accident behind it and flying ahead. Is this situation reflective of a Bible passage which says something like the stone which the builder rejected has become the cornerstone.