Yvonne Ba­boolal

Man­ag­ing di­rec­tor of the T&T Air Sup­port Co Ltd (TTAS) Dirk Barnes said he did fly on a Cess­na air­craft in Ju­ly last year with a se­nior po­lice of­fi­cer and a for­mer US of­fi­cial. "A train­ing ses­sion in­volves pre-flight in­struc­tions, one cir­cuit around the air­port, a land­ing and then a post-flight de­brief," Barnes said yes­ter­day. He said the for­mer US of­fi­cial flew the air­craft while he, as in­struc­tor, eval­u­at­ed his (the of­fi­cial) per­for­mance. Asked why the se­nior of­fi­cer went on the train­ing ses­sion, he said the of­fi­cer was ex­pe­ri­enced with the air­craft. Barnes re­peat­ed that the se­nior of­fi­cer went on no test dri­ve with his Zenith light sports air­craft.

He in­sist­ed he was not af­fil­i­at­ed to any po­lit­i­cal par­ty and got an air ser­vices con­tract for close to $1 mil­lion with the Po­lice Ser­vice to sup­ply light air­craft through no help or friend­ship from any­one. He added: "I reg­is­tered my com­pa­ny, made sure I had all the doc­u­ments in or­der and did my own thing. "It did not hap­pen overnight but took months to get every­thing in or­der." Barnes said while he and Ed­die Dalls­ingh, of Navi-Comm Avion­ics ini­tial­ly start­ed work­ing on the project to­geth­er, he (Barnes) did most of the work.

"When I re­alised that Ed­die fell back, I went ahead and reg­is­tered the com­pa­ny. Dalls­ingh is claim­ing he was the one who came up with the idea to sup­ply light sports air­craft to the po­lice to fight crime but said his pro­pos­al was re­ject­ed and Barnes' favoured. He has ques­tioned the ten­der­ing pro­ce­dure. Barnes said Dalls­ingh's com­pa­ny has been in­volved in re­pair­ing ra­dios and radar sys­tems on air­planes. "Where will Ed­die buy his planes? I have the deal­er­ship for the en­tire Caribbean. He will have to buy it from me," he said. Barnes said while he might have a new com­pa­ny he had the back­ing of Zen Air Cana­da, which had 30 years ex­pe­ri­ence in the busi­ness. He chal­lenged Op­po­si­tion MPs Don­na Cox and Colm Im­bert, who have ques­tioned the air sur­veil­lance ca­pa­bil­i­ty of the light sports air­craft, to come for a test ride on his air­plane. See pages A5 and A6