National carrier should not be a priority – Gerry Gouviea

Oct 21, 2015 News

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– focus should be on search and rescue, accident investigation

A National Air Carrier for Guyana in its current circumstance is nothing but a ‘Pie in the Sky’ and the coalition A Partnership for National Unity, Alliance for Change (APNU+AFC) Government should instead be looking to itemize its priorities and address those deficiencies in the aviation sector first.

Local aviation expert, Captain Gerry Gouveia, made the observation following an announcement on Monday last by Prime Minister and First Vice President, Moses Nagamootoo, that Guyana must and will have a return of its National Carrier.
The Prime Minister was at the time addressing the local aviation fraternity that had converged at the Arthur Chung Convention Centre for the first ever Aviation Conference to be held locally.
Gouveia subsequently told media operatives, “A national carrier is a pie in the sky, the money it will take this country to try to re-establish a national carrier and to do one that meets the international standards is a pie in the sky.”
The local aviation expert who heads the Roraima Group of Companies, told media operatives that what government has to instead do, is firstly itemize its priorities.
“We need to be more realistic,” cautioned Gouveia.   He was asked to also weigh in on Guyana’s push to have its airport receiving a Category One Status and this too was dismissed by Gouveia, who said the priority should be for the country to meet the International Civil Aviation Organization’s (ICAO) standards.
A Category One Status for an airport is only an American requirement, according to Gouveia, who drew reference to the fact that the ICAO is a global body.
“We should do everything to bring ourselves up to ICAO standards and then we could start thinking about Category One…Category One is a US Government requirement…ICAO is the world standard that Guyana is a contributing partner to and we need to meet that,” said Gouveia.
He said, the private sector, if it wants, could look into the idea of starting an international airline, “but I think bringing Guyana quickly up to ICAO standards, acceptable standards would be a priority.”
Government, he said, should be firstly looking at issues of search and rescue, accident investigation and capacity building in the Guyana Civil Aviation Authority (GCCA), before venturing to look to have a return of a National Air Carrier.
He said these two objectives can be on the list but tackling the deficiencies confronting the local aviation industry needs to be done technically and sensibly, “then you could drop it (national carrier) in the order of priority it would need to be done.”
“What happens when a plane ends up in the jungle, how long are we really going to mobilize to find it,” said Gouveia.
He continued: “and then when we find it, could we really get to the aircraft? We don’t have a helicopter with the capability, so now we got to go scrambling to Brazil or Trinidad to bring in a plane and in the mean time people could be bleeding to death.”
According to Gouveia, the things that he would have outlined are “high priority issues but again it has to come out of the technical discussions.”
Speaking to the outcome of the first such conference to be held in Guyana, Gouveia welcomed the initiative and said “my hope is that at the end of this conference, we are able to identify and list those things (of priority) and then we could develop a strategy that the government would be guided.”
Servicing the local aviation industry for a number of years through his Roraima Airways, Gouveia was asked to weigh in on how a comprehensive strategy would be funded to lift the standards of the local aviation industry.
According to Gouveia, “what is important is that we are able to prioritize things.”
He suggested that after local aviators would have put forward their recommendations, there could be some sort of consolidation of the various positions “and then we list them in order of priority.”
Guyana, he said, needs, for example, to start addressing also, the issue of its airspace management and the aviation sector needs to look at whether Air Traffic Controllers will be stationed at outlying airstrips and not just at the Ogle or Cheddi Jagan International Airports.
“So we need to be able to look at those things, and coming out of this conference, I hope that we could list the priority areas and then through discussion and dialogue, putting all the brains together, that we can come up with not only a list but the order of the priorities.”
This, he said, would be used to guide the government “because you can’t expect government to do everything at one time, we just don’t have the money.”

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