The first char­ter flight from Ghana could ar­rive in T&T in April if Trade, In­dus­try, and Tourism Min­is­ter Satyaka­ma Ma­haraj has his way. Speak­ing with re­porters on Sun­day at the Pi­ar­co In­ter­na­tion­al Air­port, Ma­haraj ex­plained that a di­rect T&T-Ghana con­nec­tion would “open new mar­kets, both for trade and in­vest­ment, but al­so, more im­por­tant­ly, for tourism”. 

Ac­cord­ing to Ma­haraj, a char­tered Ethiopi­an Air­lines air­craft will be used for the in­au­gur­al ser­vice which is al­ready see­ing pos­i­tive in­ter­est. “Our feed­back is that the in­au­gur­al flight is go­ing to be ful­ly booked,” he said.  

Ma­haraj first an­nounced plans to link T&T and Ghana in No­vem­ber 2025 at a post-cab­i­net me­dia con­fer­ence. In that an­nounce­ment, he said the in­ten­tion was to cre­ate a transat­lantic hub link­ing the East to the West, with T&T as the epi­cen­tre.

If suc­cess­ful, it would cut the jour­ney time be­tween the two coun­tries from ap­prox­i­mate­ly two days to sev­er­al hours. Sev­er­al avi­a­tion stake­hold­ers Guardian Me­dia spoke with ex­pressed con­cerns about the long-term vi­a­bil­i­ty of the route, par­tic­u­lar­ly with suf­fi­cient pas­sen­ger de­mand on­ly be­ing in one di­rec­tion.

The Gov­ern­ment has been look­ing to the African con­ti­nent as it seeks to di­ver­si­fy the econ­o­my. At last year’s Eman­ci­pa­tion Day cel­e­bra­tions, Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar an­nounced sev­er­al ini­tia­tives her gov­ern­ment planned to un­der­take.

“We will fi­nalise the Ghana Air Ser­vices Agree­ment, we will launch a West Africa-Caribbean Spe­cial Eco­nom­ic Zone, and we will list our top small and medi­um en­ter­pris­es on both the T&T and the La­gos stock ex­change,” she said. Cab­i­net ap­proved the fi­nal­i­sa­tion, sign­ing, and en­try in­to force of an Air Ser­vices Agree­ment with Ghana in Au­gust.