right’ aircraft

Fiji air services: Quest for a ‘just right’ aircraft

Fiji is about to grasp the nettle of the domestic aircraft used by its beleaguered national line, Air Pacific. Sources in Suva say that the last meeting of the airline board received reports saying that its own Brazilian built Bandeirante aircraft and its leased de Havilland Twin Otter, are regarded as ’’quite unsuit able” for its domestic services.

With Qantas management already paying off for Air Pacific on its international routes, there is pressing need to obtain new aircraft for internal services and bring them into profitability.

There is particular concern, the

sources say, over the Nadi- Suva and Suva-Labasa services which, the board report sug gests, require larger, more eco nomically viable and more comfortable aircraft. A prime problem with the 18-seater Bandeirante and Twin Otters has been their frequent inability to carry tour groups and their luggage all in one journey.

Japanese tourists particularly dislike being separated from one another, and from their bags, and Japan has been one of the significant growth areas for Fiji tourist sales.

Freight forwarders also look

forward to new and more cap able domestic aircraft. At pre sent major items of air freight arriving in Fiji have to be handled from Nadi to Suva by road and to Labasa by sea and road, leading to delays and also, particularly in the case of items like computer equipment, damage.

The range of aircraft avail able for the routes specified is fairly small and the list of types seems to be headed by the Short 360, a 36-passenger twin turbo-prop, with full-height headroom, proper galley and toilet facilities (not available on the Bandeirante or Twin Otter) and with a relatively massive freight capacity in addition to passengers.

Drive against

rheumatic

fever

Rheumatic fever is a major health problem in the Pacific with as many as one in every 100 island children contracting the disease. An eradication program was begun in Western Samoa five years ago, under the sponsorship, through the Rotary Club, of the Harold Thomas Trust, a New Zealand charitable organisation.

Professor Bob Elliott, from the Auckland Medical School, visited Western Samoa in Feb ruary to check on the progress of the program which is aimed at locating, and preventing, re curring attacks of streptococcus infection which eventually leads to rheumatic fever. He said that the fever was a major problem in the Pacific Islands, more prevalent than most people realised. Nurse Faye Hughes, who lives in Samoa, is running the program. In 1983 she gave 700 injections of penicillin, the recognised treatment for the fever, and in 1984 the figure rose to 1300. She has so far located 300 cases of rheumatic fever, whereas, before, only 70 to 80 cases were known.

Professor Elliott hopes to see further cheap and effective health programs of this type set up shortly in Tonga and then other other Pacific islands. Professor Elliott said that so far the rheumatic fever program had cost NZ545,000. —Lee Anderson, in Apia.