Brent Pin­heiro

brent.pin­heiro@guardian.co.tt

On De­cem­ber 19, 2024, a LI­AT20 ERJ145 from An­tigua touched down at the Pi­ar­co In­ter­na­tion­al Air­port in Trinidad and To­ba­go. It marked the start of a five-times week­ly com­mer­cial ser­vice be­tween the two na­tions adding 1,750 week­ly seats to the mar­ket.

One day lat­er, on De­cem­ber 20, the air­line added Kingston, Ja­maica to its route net­work bring­ing the num­ber of des­ti­na­tions the air­line serves up to 12.

It’s a re­mark­able achieve­ment for the start-up air­line that on­ly be­gan fly­ing on Au­gust 6, 2024, with two Em­braer ERJ 145s and a mis­sion to con­nect the re­gion.

Un­der new man­age­ment, and with a fa­mil­iar name, LI­AT20 is ready to con­nect the north­ern and south­ern Caribbean and make the days of mul­ti-day trav­el in the re­gion a thing of the past.

When the now-de­funct LI­AT (1974) closed its doors per­ma­nent­ly, there was a rush by Caribbean car­ri­ers to fill the void.

Sint Maarten-based air­line Winair added Bar­ba­dos, St Lu­cia, and St Vin­cent to its net­work.

Hait­ian air­line Sun­rise Air­ways al­so be­gan fly­ing to An­tigua, Do­mini­ca, St Kitts and St Lu­cia.

Lo­cal car­ri­er Caribbean Air­lines (CAL) even ac­quired more ATR 72-600s to ser­vice the routes LI­AT (1974) once op­er­at­ed. Last year, CAL added new ser­vices to Mar­tinique, Guade­loupe, Tor­to­la and Puer­to Ri­co. CAL al­so ex­pand­ed its ser­vices to Grena­da, Do­mini­ca, St Lu­cia and Bar­ba­dos.

But de­spite be­ing a new en­trant, LI­AT20 CEO, Haf­sah Ab­dul­salam, is cer­tain there is room for all car­ri­ers in the re­gion.

Ad­dress­ing re­porters at Pi­ar­co In­ter­na­tion­al three weeks ago, Ab­dul­salam said, “We’ve got hun­dreds of thou­sands of peo­ple seek­ing to trav­el every day and they just don’t have enough lift ca­pac­i­ty. So LI­AT com­ing in pro­vides that ad­di­tion­al lift, ad­di­tion­al op­tions, and (makes it) much more af­ford­able for peo­ple. So there is space, the pie is big and there’s meat for every­one.”

The pie is cer­tain­ly big. In its overview and out­look for 2025, the In­ter­na­tion­al Air Trans­port As­so­ci­a­tion (IA­TA), a trade as­so­ci­a­tion that rep­re­sents ap­prox­i­mate­ly 340 of the world’s air­lines, pre­dicts pas­sen­ger num­bers will reach 5.2 bil­lion world­wide in 2025, a 6.7 per cent rise com­pared to 2024.

IA­TA’s chief econ­o­mist Marie Owens Thom­sen is al­so op­ti­mistic about growth in the Caribbean. In an in­ter­view with Guardian Me­dia in Gene­va at IA­TA’s glob­al me­dia day,, she said, “As long as glob­al eco­nom­ic growth holds up and growth in the re­gions that tend to be the feed­er re­gions trav­el­ling to and from the Caribbean - (if) growth in those ar­eas holds up there, there is every rea­son to be pos­i­tive.”

Ab­dul­salam is sim­i­lar­ly pos­i­tive, but her vi­sion is not lim­it­ed to the Caribbean re­gion on­ly. Be­sides trans­port­ing pas­sen­gers in­tra-re­gion­al­ly, it al­so plans to in­tro­duce flights to/from the US, set­ting it up to com­pete with the likes of Caribbean Air­lines and Amer­i­can Air­lines.

Pas­sen­gers, it is hoped, will al­so come from an un­like­ly source, Africa. Con­nect­ing Africa and the Caribbean is a dream that has long been talked about by sev­er­al Caribbean Gov­ern­ment heads.

There was an at­tempt in 2022 by the Gas­ton Browne gov­ern­ment to link An­tigua & Bar­bu­da to Nige­ria with a ven­ture called An­tigua Air­ways. How­ev­er, af­ter suc­cess­ful­ly op­er­at­ing an in­au­gur­al flight, the ser­vice was shut down sev­er­al months lat­er – re­port­ed­ly for fail­ing to meet reg­u­la­to­ry re­quire­ments.

Still, for Ab­dul­salam, the Caribbean-Africa dream re­mains alive for 2025 even though LI­AT20 will not op­er­ate the transat­lantic leg. She said, “LI­AT2020 is a joint ven­ture part­ner­ship be­tween Air Peace Caribbean Ltd and the Gov­ern­ment of An­tigua & Bar­bu­da. So Air Peace Caribbean Ltd is a re­lat­ed par­ty to Air Peace Nige­ria, part of its share­hold­ings... So it will be Air Peace Nige­ria seek­ing to fly in­to the Caribbean and LI­AT2020 will then be dis­trib­ut­ing across the Caribbean.”

Con­nect­ing the Caribbean is no­to­ri­ous­ly tough due in large part to the dif­fi­cul­ties in achiev­ing economies of scale. It’s not a prob­lem unique to our re­gion, but ac­cord­ing to IA­TA di­rec­tor gen­er­al, Willie Walsh, part of the so­lu­tion lies in the equip­ment type used –name­ly us­ing tur­bo­prop air­craft in­stead of jet air­craft. But even he ad­mits that cus­tomers pre­fer to fly on jet air­craft.

Ab­dul­salam says this is some­thing they have al­so tak­en in­to con­sid­er­a­tion when plan­ning the LI­AT20 fleet.

“We’ve got a mix of tur­bo­props and jets, so the in­ten­tion is to utilise the jets for the longer routes be­cause of its com­fort, it’s faster, you know and all that. And then the tur­bo­props for the short­er routes, or to the air­ports where the jets can­not land,” she said, adding that the air­line was con­sid­er­ing small­er ca­pac­i­ty tur­bo­props to po­ten­tial­ly serve small­er is­lands.

LI­AT20 is al­so bring­ing a big­ger jet, an Em­braer E195-E2, in­to play which it plans to de­ploy on the still-to-be-launched routes like Pana­ma, Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic, Mi­a­mi, and Puer­to Ri­co. The US routescome with a caveat, they hinge on the East­ern Caribbean Civ­il Avi­a­tion Au­thor­i­ty re­gain­ing its FAA cat­e­go­ry 1 rat­ing.

With the ad­di­tion of Guyana as the air­line’s third hub, join­ing the St Vin­cent and An­tigua hubs, the LI­AT20 team has cer­tain­ly been busy. But can LI­AT20 achieve more than its pre­de­ces­sor ever did? Will the pub­lic em­brace the new LI­AT with the old LI­AT and its “Leave Is­land Any Time” moniker such a fix­ture in the Caribbean’s lex­i­con?

Ab­dul­salam cer­tain­ly be­lieves so and she’s en­cour­ag­ing every­one to give LI­AT20 a chance. She’s al­so tak­ing the “Leave Is­land Any Time” joke and flip­ping it in­to a brand promise, com­mit­ting to all that fly with LI­AT20 that the air­line will be avail­able to fly when they want to and at the sched­uled time.

To bor­row a line from Tay­lor Swift: the old LI­AT can’t come to the phone now. Why? Be­cause it’s dead.