?Air Ja­maica, the high­ly-in­debt­ed air­line that T&T's Caribbean Air­lines Ltd (CAL) is cur­rent­ly ne­go­ti­at­ing with re­gard­ing a pro­posed merg­er, on Tues­day an­nounced the fur­ther re­duc­tion of its air­craft to six and plans to shed more routes, start­ing next month. The lat­est move by the cash-strapped na­tion­al car­ri­er comes in line with the Ja­maica gov­ern­ment's sched­ule to take the air­line off its book and hand­ing over the op­er­a­tions to Caribbean Air­lines. "We are work­ing with the Caribbean Air­lines peo­ple with a view to com­plet­ing by the end of March," said Den­nis Lalor, chair­man of the Air Ja­maica Di­vest­ment Com­mit­tee at a lun­cheon meet­ing host­ed last week by busi­ness­man Gor­don Butch Stew­art in Kingston on Tues­day. Stew­art, the own­er of San­dals Re­sorts and was once led the Air Ja­maica Ac­qui­si­tion Group un­til the Ja­maica gov­ern­ment as­sumed full re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for Air Ja­maica in De­cem­ber 2004.

Air Ja­maica's pub­lic re­la­tions of­fice is­sued a state­ment stat­ing that the sus­pen­sion of ser­vice on sev­er­al routes was dri­ven by the de­par­ture of three air­craft from its fleet. "By April, Air Ja­maica will op­er­ate six air­craft; one A319, four A320's and one A32," the state­ment read. "This fleet re­duc­tion has be­come nec­es­sary as we seek to meet our fi­nan­cial oblig­a­tions, how­ev­er Air Ja­maica con­tin­ues to be the best choice for con­ve­nient sched­ule and ex­cel­lent ser­vice as we have en­sured that ad­e­quate ca­pac­i­ty is pro­vid­ed on our core routes," stat­ed Bruce No­bles, Air Ja­maica's pres­i­dent and chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer. The routes to be sus­pend­ed are New York (JFK) to Grena­da and Ja­maica to Or­lan­do, ef­fec­tive March 9, 2010, while the air­line plans to sus­pend Ja­maica to Chica­go, Ja­maica to Cu­ra­cao, Ja­maica to Ha­vana and Ja­maica to Nas­sau come April 12, 2010.

The move is ex­pect­ed to have a dev­as­tat­ing im­pact on in­for­mal com­mer­cial op­er­a­tors do­ing busi­ness in Cu­ra�ao and Grena­da, and stu­dents study­ing in Cu­ba. "By April 12, Air Ja­maica will op­er­ate 161 week­ly flights be­tween Ja­maica and five cities with dai­ly ser­vice to Bal­ti­more, Philadel­phia and Toron­to, three dai­ly flights to New York (JFK) and four dai­ly flights to Fort Laud­erdale," the state­ment read. The news al­so comes days af­ter the Gov­ern­ment re­port­ed­ly signed a non-bind­ing let­ter of in­tent with CAL. How­ev­er, Granville Valen­tine, pres­i­dent, Na­tion­al Work­ers Union, is not con­vinced by No­bles' ex­pla­na­tion and is call­ing on di­vest­ment com­mit­tee head, Den­nis Lalor, and the Bruce Gold­ing-led ad­min­is­tra­tion to come clean in re­la­tion to the deal. "A lev­el of se­cre­cy sur­rounds this let­ter of in­tent," stat­ed Valen­tine.