Crossfire: Is Caribbean Airlines' contraction a failure of regional ambition, or the discipline the region's only flag carrier should have had years ago?

CHERYL (Bridgetown)

Look, I going to be honest with you. Eighteen point eight four million dollars they lose on this expansion. EIGHTEEN POINT EIGHT FOUR MILLION. And the Minister come to Parliament and say it like is normal business. That is not normal business. That is regional carrier flying routes that nobody business expert would have approved if they was looking at the numbers honest from the start.

Caribbean Airlines is the only flag carrier the region has left after BWIA gone, after LIAT collapse, after every attempt at a serious regional aviation strategy run into the same wall — politicians in different islands wanting service to their constituents, accountants in Port of Spain trying to make the math work, and a fleet that was always too small to do both at the same time.

Cutting Dominica and St Kitts now is not failure. Is the discipline they should have had in 2023 when they was opening these routes against the advice of anybody who could read a balance sheet. The diaspora going to feel it. The islands going to feel it. That is real. But pretending that Caribbean Airlines could continue burning $18 million a year on five routes was never sustainable, and pretending the diaspora was somehow entitled to subsidized loss-making service is not honest either.

The hard truth is that the region cannot afford the aviation network the diaspora wants. We need to talk about that. We need to talk about who pays, because the answer right now is taxpayers in Trinidad, who is subsidizing flights for diaspora in Brooklyn and Toronto. That is the question CARICOM should be addressing. Not whether CAL should keep losing money. Whether the diaspora should help pay for the network they need.

DE STATSMAN (neutral)

Cheryl is right about the math. $18.84 million in cumulative losses across five routes since 2023 is not sustainable, and the political cover that allowed CAL to launch the expansion without sufficient commercial review in the first place is itself the failure she is naming. Trinidad taxpayers underwriting loss-making routes to Dominica and St Kitts — routes that primarily served diasporans visiting family — is a transfer payment that was happening without anyone formally calling it that. Naming it is appropriate.

But there are two harder questions underneath Cheryl’s analysis. The first is what regional aviation is actually for. Caribbean Airlines is technically state-owned by Trinidad. Functionally, since BWIA, since LIAT, it is the only carrier that operates intra-Caribbean routes at scale for the diaspora. If it withdraws from the smaller markets and codeshare partners fail to materialize, the diaspora travel network for those islands collapses. That is not Trinidad’s problem in any narrow sense. It is the region’s problem. The question of who pays is precisely the right question Cheryl is asking, but the answer cannot be: nobody, therefore the network ends.

The second harder question is whether the diaspora-pays model Cheryl is gesturing at is feasible. Diaspora-funded regional aviation has been attempted, informally, for decades — every overpriced flight from JFK to Cheddi Jagan is a diaspora-pays subsidy of the rest of the network. A more formalized version would require some combination of diaspora-targeted bond instruments, levies, or membership programs. None of which currently exist. CARICOM has not even raised the discussion in any formal heads-of-government meeting.

So Cheryl is right that the contraction is fiscally necessary and the diaspora-pays question is the right next move. She may also be optimistic about how quickly CARICOM can hold that conversation. Watch July. If the heads of government do not address regional aviation explicitly at the July meeting, the codeshare will become the de facto answer — which means partial restoration, partial loss, and the question of who pays gets answered by attrition rather than by policy.