The To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly (THA) wants a sep­a­rate air­line to ser­vice the T&T air­bridge. THA Chief Sec­re­tary Orville Lon­don pro­posed this to Fi­nance Min­is­ter Lar­ry Howai when the two met dur­ing a 2015 bud­get con­sul­ta­tion on Ju­ly 17. "I think that one of the is­sues we did get trac­tion from the Min­is­ter of Fi­nance was the delink­ing of the T&T?air­bridge from Caribbean Air­lines (CAL). Our po­si­tion is that we are in fact in the present sys­tem mix­ing two types of op­er­a­tions which are in­com­pat­i­ble," said Lon­don in a state­ment on the meet­ing at last Wednes­day's post-Ex­ec­u­tive Coun­cil me­dia brief­ing.

"We are ask­ing Caribbean Air­lines to make a prof­it but, on the oth­er hand, we are ac­cept­ing the fact that the T&T air­bridge has to be sub­sidised. We are say­ing that this sit­u­a­tion is un­ten­able, it is un­work­able and it will cre­ate prob­lems for the cen­tral gov­ern­ment and, of course, the peo­ple of T&T." "Our strong rec­om­men­da­tion is that we re­turn to a more ef­fi­cient arrange­ment which would en­tail that we have a sep­a­rate air­line run­ning the bridge be­tween T&T where we could deal with all the nu­ances, we could de­ter­mine what lev­el of sub­sidy, we could de­ter­mine what is the best type of air­plane and we can en­sure that it achieve the ob­jec­tive with re­spect to bring­ing peo­ple be­tween the two is­lands," he said.

"We are con­vinced that if we have an ef­fi­cient air­bridge there will be tens of mil­lions worth in ben­e­fit to the tourism sec­tor," Lon­don said in the state­ment. Lon­don said he was heart­ened by the re­sponse of the Min­is­ter of Fi­nance as well as by the re­sponse of Trans­port Min­is­ter Stephen Cadiz, whom he met ear­li­er this month and was look­ing for­ward to a state­ment on the mat­ter in this year's bud­get.