The Editor, Sir:

Is Air Jamaica a business, or is it an expensive emotional attachment to a national sentiment? There are two features which mark most independent ex-colonies: a flag and a national carrier. Even oil-rich Trinidad has found it impossible to finance the national sentiment BWIA and has had to close the books on that one.

The chairman and CEO of Air Jamaica offers us a show of a glittering future in the South American market. Does he, or anyone else in Jamaica remember LACSA or Avianca, two South American airlines that once travelled the Jamaica route? In fact, LACSA, which is headquartered in Costa Rica, was the mainstay of the link with Grand Cayman and Costa Rica. Avianca served Jamaica in the early 1950s from Kingston to New York and some points in South America.

The world has no place for airlines which bleed, especially one that bleeds a government that cannot find funds to provide proper medical and social welfare facilities for its citizens. An airline is a business that needs to be operated as a business. Many of us remember the glamour of Pan American, KLM flying out of Jamaica daily, Chicago and Southern that used to fly a leg to Jamaica and on to South America and British South American Airways (now British Airways) that gave up on South America. So, for those of us who know our history, the chairman and CEO of Air Jamaica is not selling us or telling us anything we do not already know and have not seen.

I respectfully suggest that the chairman and CEO of Air Jamaica read the views of that great West Indian Sir W. Arthur Lewis on the toys of a post-Independent country that is an ex-colony.

I am, etc.,

MIDDLETON WILSON

Miami, Florida

Via Go-Jamaica