LIAT’S two companies – North and South

Once in LIAT’s lifetime, it efficiently operated two companies in the black! One in
the South and one in the North, Four Island Air and Inter-Island Air, and their fleet
consisted of Britton Norman islanders and de Havilland Twin Otters. These aircraft
kept the Northern and Southern small islands fed from the international flights in a
most efficient manner, taking the load off the larger aircraft for non-stop flights
and the ‘milk-run’ all the way from Antigua to Trinidad, later to Guyana, USVI
BVI, and Puerto Rico.
So now the South wants their share of the market by establishing an operating base
in the South, and in particular to give movement to St. Vincent’s airport. The
absence of Barbados from the table, allows St. Vincent to make a bid for the
Barbados LIAT operation but does not rule out northern access to Barbados. It
would make a lot of sense for the two airline companies to start with an interline
agreement that allows both to serve the region complementing the routes and being
successful.
The guarantee of success is the inclusion of a private sector component geared to
profitability, rather than being forced to hide LIAT’s financial failures and
indebtedness in shareholder governments’ budgets. LIAT has been wooed in the
past for interline cooperation by international interests, but such were their
available financials, that they made no investment sense. Most countries know that
government-run airlines tend to operate with low or no profitability because of
government business interference and sometimes trickery in fees and routes. All
which standard operating procedures, in good business, preclude.
LIAT 2020 is expected to cannibalize LIAT 1974 which will leave the airline in
the South a meager platform to mobilize human resources in the key areas of
pilots, maintenance, and operations and as there is talk in the region of looking into
Brazilian equipment (Embraer) there will have to be training on the ground and in
the air. All will take time. So if LIAT is the airline of the North, and WIAT is the
airline of the South, LIAT 2020 is up, and almost ready now to Leave Island Any
Time, while the South is saying, wait!