(Take Your Pick)
pp. 7-8 · Read in the full issue
Nadi's Progress Is Good—Bad—lndifferent (Take Your Pick)
From a Suva Correspondent Twenty-two men, armed with briefcases and a businesslike air, arrived in Fiji at the beginning of November. Together with a group of local men they soon formed themselves into the 17th session of the South Pacific Air
Transport Council.
FOR 10 days they met—behind closed doors. They then pro duced a Press release which said little beyond the fact that the United Kingdom, Australian and New Zealand delegates had agreed to recommend to their governments that the programme to train locals to take over Nadi International Airport should be continued.
At present the three countries run the big airport between them, through the Air Transport Council.
The leader of the Australian dele gation, Dr. K. N. E. Bradfield, said the whole of the electricity generating plant at Nadi airport would be trans ferred to the Fiji Government.
Responsibility for works, services and stores would be transferred from New Zealand to Fiji.
They'll Spend A Million
The Governor of Fiji, Sir Derek Jake way, who opened the meeting, mentioned that the airport’s house keeping bill for 1965-66 would be £1,083,000, but he didn’t say what it would be spent on.
He also said the council was giving thought to the development of the airport to enable it to handle the supersonic aircraft which should be booming all over the world by the mid-1970’5.
Beyond that, nobody learned any thing.
When your correspondent asked for further details of the transfer of the electricity plant to the Fiji Govern ment, he was told that the Governor would be talking about it in his speech at the Legislative Council’s Budget meeting on November 26.
Thus we would be thunderstealing, obviously! (Is it that there will be so many unpalatable things to be told on Budget Day that a little news about a free gift of a million or so to the Colony will coat the pill?) Nadi Airport cost £1 million of
somebody’s money last year—presum ably the taxpayers of Britain, NZ and Australia. It is several millions in the red.
Perhaps it is finally coming into its own, but if so, we have to work it out for ourselves.
Passenger traffic in the last 12 months has increased by 52 per cent, over the previous year. And airlines are no longer thinking in terms of landing for refuelling only, over flying or coming in at night and the awkward early morning hours.
Three airlines are advertising day time departures and landings at Nadi and no longer are the people who man the terminal buildings assuming nocturnal habits.
Tourism in Fiji is growing. Nadi Airport will play a vital part in gain ing profits for the industry, but it seems its successes as well as its failures are destined to be kept secret.
Apparently in October, landing charges, which were already higher than at many other airports, were in creased by 10 per cent., but no an nouncement was made of the fact.
Some airline executives have talked about Nadi Airport pricing itself out of business. It seems a very remote possibility at present, but if airlines are seriously thinking on those lines, it could one day have a deleterious effect on the local tourist industry, and the local people ought to be told just what the situation is.
And what will “localisation” of the airport mean and when will it happen?
Already 157 posts at Nadi are filled by Fiji Government civil servants on secondment to the New Zealand ad ministering authority.
The whisper is that the three gov ernments plan to complete localisa tion of airport personnel and hand the airport over to Fiji management in 1971. But it’s just a whisper, and it would be nice to have some facts for a change.