NOT B-WEE AGAIN!

WHATEVER the Government does on the BWIA West Indies Airways Limited issue, one thing it should not do is acquire, for the second time in just under 42 years, a controlling interest in the regional airline. And certainly not since BWIA’s financial position, as has been the case with so many international airline majors, has been badly bruised by the downturn in the United States economy and the marked slide in air passenger travel, as a result of September 11, 2001, and all that went with the United States invasion of Iraq.

The paranoia, encouraged by economic insecurity, along with the trauma of September 11, Afghanistan and the ongoing United States war on Iraq, in defiance of the United Nations, has seen the collapse of several international airlines, and the scaling back of flights by yet more, desperately trying to keep airborne. It would be economically unwise for Government to acquire majority shareholding interest in the cash-strapped airline, and politically incorrect to do so, even as it seeks to rid itself of the burden of its social and economic involvement in the sugar industry. It cannot in one breath articulate the need to restructure Caroni (1975) Limited, for long a multi-billion dollar burden to Trinidad and Tobago taxpayers, and in the same breath argue the need to once again control the airline it had divested only as short a time ago as February 12, 1995.

Had it done so in 2000, on the heels of BWIA’s Chief Executive Officer, Conrad Aleong’s earlier announcements of heartening net profits for the airline of US$9.1 million in 1998 and US$3.7 million the following year, Government could have been excused on the ground that a shareholder friendly BWIA, could have been held up as being, potentially at least, equally taxpayer friendly. But Government [read taxpayers] with the stark reality of far more powerful international airlines being in a tailspin, would be committing itself and the taxpayers to mollycoddling an airline, whose fleet renewal, involving six new Boeing 737-800 Next Generation aircraft, which began a mere three years ago, would mean an uncomfortable increase in the new majority shareholder’s debt burden.

The late 1990s were a repeat of the early 1940s, when BWIA, then also turning profits, even though somewhat modestly, expanded its fleet. Later, BWIA would be owned by the former British Overseas Airways Corporation, from which Government would purchase a 90 percent shareholding in December of 1961. The puzzling thing with respect to BWIA, is that although it has been saluted as making a remarkable contribution to Caribbean development, and saw itself as the regional airline, and providing badly needed schedules and routes to the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and throughout the Region for Caribbean people, failed to attract investors from any Caribbean country other than Trinidad and Tobago.

The only outstanding exception to this was a Barbados-based company in 2000. But no Caribbean government ever invested in the airline save our own. Yet, should BWIA become another victim of the slide in the US economy, 9-11 and now the war on Iraq, Eastern Caribbean residents, specifically, would lose the flexibility of schedules BWIA now affords them. Trinidad and Tobago taxpayers should not be called upon to subsidise travel to and from the Caribbean for the benefit of other CARICOM people, whose gratitude is matched by their lack of investment in the airline. In turn, BWIA has not demonstrated, indeed how could it, that given the adverse conditions besetting airlines today, it is in a position to attract needed additional passengers, freight and revenue to make it a viable proposition to taxpayers.