Chairman: CAL’s New York route begins to show profits

Responding yesterday, to a number of questions on issues pertinent to the operations of the national and regional carrier at the Joint Select Committee on State Enterprises inquiring into the operation of the regional carrier, Mohammed said, “I can firmly say that we are making that turn” on profitability.

“I am happy to inform that we have turned around (the) New York (route). I believe the initiatives that we have been working on have begun to bear fruit,” he said.

“We do believe that in 2018 we should be able to break even. Our numbers indicate that 2016 was better than 2015. Our numbers suggest that 2017 will be better than 2016. We are hopeful that by 2018, CAL perhaps will no longer be a burden on the taxpayers.” On its assets, Mohammed said that CAL operates 17 aircraft, five of which it owns. The remaining 12 are leased. The aircraft may not be new, he said, but they were safe and reliable. He said CAL was conducting a fleet review to capture, not only passengers’ needs, but the types of aircraft best suited to fly certain routes, reliability and costs.

Noting that routes previously run by Air Jamaica and taken over by CAL were not doing well, and apart from Cheddi Jagan International Airport (CJIA) in Guyana to John F Kennedy International Airport in New York “which is one of our cash cows as it were,” member Fazal Karim asked if CAL intended to drop any route and engage new routes. The airlines believes that it should continue on the routes currently served, Mohammed said.

With two of its five ATR 72-600 issues resolved, Mohammed said adding, “We believe that there is a window of opportunity that we can grow the airline regionally without the addition of aircraft”. The ATRs had been a source of concern in recent weeks and two had been out of commission. One has been on a flight test and is due to be back in operation.

CAL was also looking at a new route in the region for which the ATR could be used, has made a application for the destination and was awaiting a response from the regulators. He did not name the route and at the end of the hearing, Mohammed was not prepared to answer any question from the media. In relation to CAL’s safety record and the incident involving CAL and Fly Jamaica aircraft at the CJIA last year in which the wing of the Fly Jamaica plane was clipped by a CAL aircraft, Mohammed said the incident was still being investigated.

On the 2011 incident in which a CAL aircraft overrun the runway at CJIA, CAL Acting Chief Executive Officer Jagmohan Singh said the cause was human error.

The incident investigated by the Guyana Civil Aviation Authority (GCAA) with the help of the United States National Safety Transport Board. “We were informed very early in the investigation of what may have occurred that caused the incident,” he said.

With that information, he said, the airline immediately started remedial training for all its crews including pilots and flight attendants.

In the aviation business, he said that the majority of accidents or incidents can be put down to human error. It is important to learn from aviation incidents and accidents and take correct actions in training of crews.

“We carried out full training and when the report was eventually laid, we found that we had conducted most, if not all of the training needed for the crews,” he said.