Dear Editor,

It is quite baffling why the Jamaican government sold the national airline to Caribbean Airlines. Just before Air Jamaica was sold in 2010, the Jamaican government repeated that the high cost of operating the airline was a serious drag on national finances and prevented the government from attending to urgent social needs. That was a good although not altogether persuasive argument for getting out of the airline business. But it turns out that the Jamaica government did not get out of the airline business. It sold Air Jamaica to the Trinidad and Tobago government-owned Caribbean Airlines, retaining a 16 per cent share of the business and picking up some US$800 million in costs. Before that the Jamaican government had sold Air Jamaica’s envied gates at London’s Heathrow Airport for an undisclosed amount of money to Virgin Atlantic.

The argument can be made that Jamaica cannot afford to own an airline. Clearly, that was not the argument prevailing among the Jamaican government ministers responsible for air traffic, since it still owns a part of an airline. So the better argument concerns whether selling a national carrier and buying part of another national carrier resulted in the best deal for Jamaica and the Caribbean. Without more information on the deal that is now available, it is hard to arrive at a definitive answer.

Jamaica and the rest of the Caribbean need a reliable and effective air transportation system to connect the various islands and mainland territories. At the moment, several government-owned or partially government-owned Caribbean-based airlines operate in the region. These include American Eagle operating out of Muñoz Marin Airport in San Juan, Puerto Rico; Cubana Airlines operating out of José Martí Airport in Havana, Cuba; LIAT Airways, operating out of VC Bird Airport in Antigua; and Bahamas Air operating out of Lynden Pindling Airport in Nassau, The Bahamas. All the large airlines in the Caribbean have some sort of government ownership. Moreover, some Caribbean governments pay generous subsidies to foreign airlines to fly to their country. So government ownership or part-ownership is not a problem. Rational air transportation should be.

It is time for the heads of all the Caribbean states to come together and merge all the government-operated airlines in a single company that could then establish the priority of serving the people of the region. A single company with appropriately located hubs should be able to provide the sort of efficient and reliable service that is not attractive to foreign airlines. Such a service would be a boon to those people of the Caribbean who want to go from one destination to another within the region without the additional hassles of going to Miami or Caracas or Costa Rica or any other out-of-the-way mainland place. That would then give us a Caribbean airline for the Caribbean people.

James Watt

Mandeville, Manchester