These are challenging times for the aviation sector in the Caribbean. Last Saturday’s Caribbean Airlines incident at Timehri in which, thankfully, there was neither any fatality nor serious injury, comes amidst other difficulties facing regional airline travel. These are associated chiefly with considerations of profitability of regional airlines, traveller concerns over fare prices plus the recent and now, hopefully settled issues that arose out of the arrival of REDjet in the region.
The CAL incident has had quite a significant ripple effect in the region which appears to have rather less to do with the airline’s excellent safety record and more to do with what may or may not have caused the accident. In the wake of the accident, reports reached Georgetown of responses from Trinidad and Tobago which appear to suggest that bad weather and the physical circumstances at the Timehri facility itself could have been the cause of the incident. Those reports are discomfiting if only because the last thing that the less than robust sector needs is an intra-regional quarrel that could affect passenger confidence, both at the levels of visitors to the region and intra-regional travel. The former has to do mostly with tourists coming to the Caribbean from North America and Europe, primarily, while the latter is concerned with travel between and among the various territories, principally for business purposes.
In both cases serious economic issues arise. On the one hand several countries in the region depend on extra-regional visitor arrivals to sustain tourist industries that are struggling to recover from the recent global economic and financial crisis. One the other, one need hardly say much about the importance of intra-regional travel from the standpoint of actualizing the goals of the Caribbean Single Market. These are serious economic industries that have to do with expanding existing Caribbean business enterprises, creating new ones and increasing investment and employment opportunities for people in the region. Then of course there are the implications of all this for the regional airlines, not least Caribbean Airlines, which have been going through difficult times.
If, and understandably so, the CAL incident is likely to linger in our minds for some time, the last thing we need is an intra-regional quarrel over who or what is to blame for the incident. Thankfully, as a local aviator pointed out in an interview with this newspaper, international aviation standards are not set by individual countries so that it is not a matter of apportioning blame but simply waiting for the competent authority to make a professional determination. That is what we must do in this instance. Already, there are aviation officials in Guyana who have become fretful over the ‘noises’ that have been emanating from Trinidad and in these circumstances tempers can easily flare.
The problem here is that we can easily lose sight of the bigger picture, that picture being, first, the need for us to work as a region to help provide people who fly in our region with assurances regarding our excellent aviation safety record; that apart there is the need for us to remain focused on the challenges facing the regional airline industry and the economic implications of these challenges for the region – some countries more than others – and not to allow the CAL incident to give cause to distraction that might be far costlier than the CAL incident itself.