We have something special in Aurigny
PLANET PEEWEE for president of Economic Development. If the current president can say, ‘I don’t understand how Aurigny’s difficult financial position has arisen’, then this must be worrying because Peewee’s cartoon, accompanying the open letter by the president to the Press on 23 October, clearly does. As Peewee put it with tongue in cheek: if we change from single to double-decker buses then we’ll have twice as many people travelling. And when the Economic Development president says ‘there is a vision which informs a clear policy’, one can only assume there is a cataract in the vision when it comes to subsidy analysis, consumer benefit, economic drivers to business and the need for long-term certainty in budget planning for infrastructure spending.
The vision, which appears to be an open wallet policy where the sky’s the limit (an opening gambit for next year’s election perhaps?), is a clear example of hope over experience. The naive assumption is that competition will drive down prices while maintaining reliability in the long term when there is not, and never will be, sufficient volume to sustain that economic model for this island. Flybe have made it clear that they are ‘open to offering new services from Guernsey, if they are profitable’. They will only be profitable when they have used low fares to drive out the competition then resort to monopolistic pricing and service – as we have all experienced before and which is even more inevitable with the backing of Virgin.
The Isle of Man closed their airline and adopted ‘open skies’. And lengthened the runway. Prices have fallen but the algorithms ensure they stay high at peak times and the service is appalling. Flight dates and times keep changing to suit the profitability of the airline, which cancels at a moment’s notice. The IOM used to have four flights a day into Gatwick. There is now one flight a day into Gatwick – at 8pm. BA used to fly from Heathrow to IOM but gave up. Flybe were going to have a base in the IOM because it is cheaper to park planes there than on the apron in Gatwick, but they’ve now closed that down and stopped their Heathrow-IOM route. It lasted six months. Cargo and mail flights are an issue. And so are the queues through their airport security, which has to cope with only one or two flights with larger aircraft a day rather than more flights and smaller aircraft.
But as great an issue as any is the public confidence in reliability of travel. Businessmen are besieging elected members of the Tynwald with complaints about travel to and from the IOM to do business. The majority of respondents to an IOM Chamber of Commerce questionnaire believed that the current air services to London had a negative effect on business. The Manx Insurance Association has stated the clear conflict between the short-term profit objectives of airline companies and the need to provide a long-term strategic airline service. Holiday-makers are travelling a day early to the UK for inter-connecting flights because they cannot trust the airlines. The IOM is now losing financial services business and that industry accounts for 75% of IOM GDP. We cannot afford to go the same way.
We have something very special in Aurigny. A unique selling point for this island. Having our own airline means that crews are based here, staff are employed in maintenance and administration here, all contributing to the economy. It means that when passengers are stuck in the UK, Aurigny will do its best to bring them home. But most important of all, with our own airline we are in control of confidence in the future, in business and in the drivers of this economy’s ability to pay the high and increasing cost of its services to the population.
CHRIS RUSSELL
1F, Tudor House,
Le Bordage,
St Peter Port,
Guernsey,
GY1 1DB.