The most trou­bling thing about the cur­rent fuss about free trav­el at Caribbean Air­lines is how fa­mil­iar it all is. Dur­ing the many decades of the air­line's pre­vi­ous in­car­na­tion as BWIA, flights were plagued with free­load­ing and flight sta­tus abus­es, whim­si­cal ef­forts at pam­per­ing wealthy, pow­er­ful peo­ple who were per­fect­ly ca­pa­ble of pay­ing for their own first-class tick­ets to any des­ti­na­tion to which the air­line for­mer­ly known as BWee flew.

This con­tin­ued to hap­pen de­spite sev­er­al in­ter­ven­tions by the State and many bold and up­stand­ing state­ments about a com­mit­ment to busi­ness prin­ci­ples and prof­itabil­i­ty.

What fi­nal­ly scut­tled any chance that BWIA might have ever had of mov­ing to sus­tain­able prof­itabil­i­ty was the un­of­fi­cial ero­sion of pur­pose im­plic­it in schem­ing to arrange free seats on the air­line. That in­evitably trig­gered a "get mine" rush for free­ness even among staff who ful­ly un­der­stood that this ill-con­sid­ered plun­der­ing of the air­line's core prod­uct, seats on pop­u­lar flights, would as­sure the com­pa­ny's fail­ure.

This fail­ure to ho­n­our the im­por­tance of as­sign­ing the high­est pri­or­i­ty and val­ue to the prod­uct of our lo­cal air­line has al­ways been the source of its fi­nan­cial rot, and it shouldn't be nec­es­sary to ex­plain this to the cur­rent board of CAL. Any at­tempt at dis­miss­ing con­cerns about the assig­na­tion of 19 pre­mi­um seats when flights are ap­par­ent­ly booked sol­id as racist is sim­ply di­ver­sion­ary and des­per­ate.

The cur­rent sit­u­a­tion finds CAL vice-chair­man Mo­han Jaikaran try­ing to find in­ven­tive ways to ex­plain a re­quest, which seems to have ar­rived in the pack­ag­ing of a di­rec­tive, to is­sue 19 tick­ets for a Moth­er's Day con­cert as part of an event spon­sor­ship for WINTV, a com­pa­ny to which Mr Jaikaran is af­fil­i­at­ed.

CAL is still to clar­i­fy the na­ture of the re­la­tion­ship be­tween WINTV, Mr Jaikaran and its own me­dia spon­sor­ship strate­gies, but the com­pa­ny must have been aware that such pro­mo­tion­al arrange­ments be­tween a di­rec­tor's com­pa­ny and the air­line would need to be par­tic­u­lar­ly trans­par­ent and ca­pa­ble of with­stand­ing in­de­pen­dent scruti­ny.

This prob­lem with the lo­cal air­line has been an is­sue be­fore and will con­tin­ue to shred the com­pa­ny's fi­nances as long as the bot­tom line of CAL is un­der­writ­ten by the tax­pay­ers of T&T and gov­ern­ment ap­pointees in­ter­vene care­less­ly. Caribbean Air­lines is in a par­tic­u­lar­ly in­ter­est­ing po­si­tion at this time. CAL looks set to be­come the flag car­ri­er air­line for Guyana and talks al­so seem pos­i­tive for the same priv­i­lege to be con­ferred by Grena­da.

This opens re­al pos­si­bil­i­ties for the air­line's fu­ture if it runs a tight busi­ness mod­el and re­mem­bers that it is com­pet­ing in a fierce mar­ket for pas­sen­gers. CAL has had a tur­bu­lent pas­sage since be­ing res­ur­rect­ed from the fi­nan­cial ash­es of BWIA and con­tin­ues to strive for suc­cess on the strength of a sub­stan­tial fu­el sub­sidy which gives the air­line a key com­pet­i­tive ad­van­tage with­in the re­gion and on its strongest routes.

It would be noth­ing less than crim­i­nal if that sub­sidy was be­ing spent on sus­tained free­ness in the ser­vice of po­lit­i­cal ex­pe­di­ence. A clear, lu­cid ex­pla­na­tion of this messy sit­u­a­tion is called for.