- NEWSDAY.CO.TT - A la Une - Hier 06:05

Rethink CAL 2-year deadline

THE EDITOR: It's good to see the attempt to rein in runaway state corporations that can't seem to get a handle on costs and losses.The rationale for getting rid of BWIA, a respected brand worldwide, was that the unions were too powerful, inflexible and the political directorate had a different profit vision for replacing the airline. That turned out to be a farce as its replacement, CAL, became yet another dumping ground for unmotivated loyalists, with the resultant inefficiency and squandermania. A lot more damage can be done in two more years as we await some sort of analyses of CAL's operations. My question is: What does the CAL management do on a daily, weekly and monthly basis? That is how proper managers operate. Alternatively, I propose a two-month deadline to produce those analytical reports. It takes a few weeks or less to produce detailed reports on costs, revenues and profits per passenger kilometre per route; costs and revenues per cargo tonne kilometre, and the investment appraisal business cases for acquiring more routes on top of what seems to be loss-making routes. In addition, CAL management must produce reports on how it is adhering to recommended performance ratio criteria of the International Civil Aviation Organisation and the International Air Transport Association, ie, number and costs of employees per passenger km, per aircraft, per route, per station, etc. These reports take days to formulate and should already be there. While we're at it, the same demand should be made of the Airports Authority, Port Authority, PTSC and TTPost, which probably suffer from the same ailments and lack of direction and purpose. So, let's move away from deadlines that would have been imposed by former governments that knew exactly what was going on and really weren't looking for solutions. Let's change the speed at which solutions are sought. Good luck. D RAYMOND Diego Martin The post Rethink CAL 2-year deadline appeared first on Trinidad and Tobago Newsday.