condition of national airlines in both the Bahamas and the Cayman Islands. We think the clippings arrive because of continuing suggestions from the Shadow Minister of Tourism, Mr. David Allen, that Bermuda should fly its own airline.

The PLP's Mr. Allen has never accepted the dangers caused to small islands by the financial drain of having their own airlines and has continued to suggest an airline for Bermuda against all the evidence.

The Nassau Guardian has reported that Bahamasair was more than $100 million dollars in debt when Canadian airline executive Mr. Barry MacInnes was hired to run the airline two years ago. Mr. MacInnes said that the airline had poor schedule reliability because they were very poor on non-existent credit arrangements with the suppliers of airline parts.

Mr. MacInnes said, "For a number of years the company has not been paying its bills on a regular basis.'' He said the assets of the company, including five aircraft, were fully mortgaged and he subsequently discovered that the market value of the Bahamasair aircraft was less than the mortgage.

Since January, 54 Cayman Airways employees have either been let go or have been notified that their jobs will be eliminated. The airline is now saving about $1 million a year due to staff reorganisation. Cayman Airways now has 262 staff in Cayman and 95 employees in North America.

Earlier this year a consortium of Cayman Island banks put together a US $20 million recapitalisation of the cash-strapped Cayman Airways. At that time the airline had been operating on a day-to-day cash basis. Restructuring of the airline has been going on since last December. In March, Cayman Airways was in what was called a "bankrupt situation for a bankrupt company''.

It has been suggested by Mr. David Allen that a Bermuda airline would lease aircraft rather than purchase them. Cayman Airways ran into trouble because it was behind in hundreds of thousands of dollars to Guinness Peat Aviation from whom it leases two Boeing 737 aircraft.

The projected Cayman Airways losses for 1993 are $12 million.

We feel Bermudians should think about just how fortunate Bermuda is to have avoided such heavy losses. Bermuda could have suffered millions of dollars of losses on an unnecessary airline. During tough tourism times the present Government was heavily criticised for not rushing to provide a Bermuda airline. It is now clear that with a Bermuda airline we would have risked greatly increasing Bermuda's taxes to pay for a "bird in the bush'' which might not have produced more visitors.

This newspaper does not always agree with the Minister of Tourism, the Hon.

C.V. (Jim) Woolridge, but it is to his great credit that he has suffered abuse but continued to oppose a Bermuda airline. He has done the people the great service of refusing to throw away their money.