Up Front

with the Editor

1 SPENT a couple of years as an aviation reporter on a Sydney daily at a time when it seemed one African state or another was achiev ing independence every day of the week, and it was something of a joke to us that just as soon as the flag of each new nation fluttered to the masthead there came an an nouncement that the country was inaugurating its own international airline to compete on world routes.

Having your own airline appeared to be the first prerequisite for in dependence, whether you had enough schools and hospitals, or any sort of economy at all.

The only people who did well out of the glut of international airlines that sought to take to the air in this period were the people who bought and sold second-hand aeroplanes.

The South Pacific nations currently appear to be embarked on a similar exercise in empty nationalism. Air Pacific, Suva-based, but launched as the airline which would service the whole South Pacific region and thus avoid the errors of those African mini-states, is fighting for its future as an international carrier.

Air Pacific links most of the central Pacific Islands as far north as Nauru, and flies to Australia. Its ownership is comprised of Fiji, Qantas, British Airways and Air New Zealand (each with 22.68 per cent of the shareholding), and the British Solomons, the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, Western Samoa, Tonga and Nauru (each with 1.85 per cent).

Nauru’s shares are still in existence although the Republic of Nauru for mally withdrew from the consortium in 1972 because of differences of opinion on how Air Nauru and Air Pacific should work together. Air Nauru has a jet, and is currently taking delivery of a second one, and operates international services as far north as Japan and as far south as Melbourne.

It was Nauru’s decision to with draw which began the cancer which

has eaten away at Air Pacific’s strength. Since then, Tonga and Western Samoa have begun making independence noises, and relations between most of the partners are severely strained. A common cri ticism one hears is that Air Pacific is using its international services to subsidise the costs of its internal Fiji service which of course mainly bene fits only Fiji. Whether or not this is true, these are matters of detail which ought not to be allowed to obscure the real principle, which is: Is the South Pacific to have one regional airline doing the greatest good for the greatest number, or is every mini-state going to establish its own mini international airline and fight its neighbours for landing rights and customers?

Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara, Fiji’s Prime Minister, summed it up in his usual direct fashion following the re cent South Pacific Forum in Raro tonga, when he said that the Forum would stand or fall on civil aviation, which would be “the real test of Pacific regional co-operation”.

He said: “If we fail to resolve this problem then the Forum will become nothing more than a talking shop”.

And he might have added that it would also mean the end of locally controlled aviation in the Pacific Islands.

That Forum authorised Fiji to call a meeting of civil aviation ministers to consider the future. The meeting is now being arranged. It’s more than overdue.

There might be some argument for the Republic of Nauru to con tinue operating its own international airline, because for one thing it can afford the luxury, and for another, it would otherwise be isolated in its mid-Pacific phosphate island. But one can’t see any other members of the consortium achieving anything else but trouble and bankruptcy with their own international airlines.

Stuart Inder