As has been shown in the Air Jamaica fiasco over the last two or more years, national and regional institutions have been hard to come by, have cost their owners millions - if not Billions - of dollars, and the politics around such purchases or transfers is insurmountable.

I have spoken here about sitting Caribbean Prime Ministers as King This and Queen That because, in effect, that is what they are. Elected, yes, but still sitting on a throne in their own country as high as any in the world to which the incumbent ascended by divine or familial right. In fact, they invariably got there by devious means, and - until the next election, anyway - are more glued to that seat than any monarch.

Mr. Gilmore is a lawyer and has lived - perhaps still lives - in Canada, so he should himself intimately know by now the secrecy and control that goes on in Commonwealth Parliamentary “democracies” - the Canadian incumbent King Stephen (Harper) is an outstanding example of just how far a single person can dictate an entire country’s future with just a few insiders to bark his praises on command. And in Canada King Stephen is running a minority government!

In Barbados we call these so-called insiders “yard fowls”, in Ottawa they call them “the Prime Minister’s Cabinet”. And in both places they had better damn well do as they are told.

There have been proposals on this Forum - and on the Caribbean-ALPA site before that - on how the various regional airlines might come together under one brand, but - actually coming from the professionals in the industry - that has all been ignored. You see, it did not originate in a head of Government, Parliamentary Secretary (or any such Head of any government department) nor did it originate at a Heads of Government Meeting - appropriately referred to as HoG Meetings - so, such suggestions inherently have no value.

Source, you see, plays a vital part in decisions and actions by the various temporary royalty in the Caribbean, regardless of their practical value. On the other hand, even the most impractical (some would say idiotic) of proposals - if put forward by a reigning politician - can successfully go forward to legislation and implementation simply because of source (and therefore support).

AirOne is in the process of trying to start an LCC airline in Barbados. Mr. Gilmore has never worked for an airline in Barbados and in fact is not current with the regional aviation situation, has no official place or standing in in the region, yet he finds it appropriate to place an objection with the US DoT against AirOne.

When I heard that I immediately wondered if there was another agenda afoot. Perhaps Gilmore and associates were already in the process of themselves starting an LCC alternative to Caribbean Airlines and were hastening to scotch AirOne - and ensure their own venture had the correct ownership balance - before launching their own plans in public.

Certainly he has associates who could raise the funds to do so, but it would be much more difficult for them to find that local ownership percentage.- when AirOne is on the ground and already has business interests there.

If you look hard enough I think you will see that the ventures Gilmore and his associates were involved with in the Caribbean have, in the main, all ended in disaster. One of those ventures was involvement in the BWIA privatisation with Ed Acker, and we all know what happened to that.

As for his Air Jamaica involvement, after a Billion dollars in losses it would be a miracle if the name ever rose again with Jamaican ownership. Not all to Gilmore’s account, to be sure, but Stewart must have got his ideas for the airline’s eventual implosion from somewhere.

So I smell a rat in Mr. Gilmore’s involvement. He has been far away from the regional action for so long, yet he still dabbles from afar, telling us all - as a region - how we should conduct our affairs and pretends to know “how it is” on the ground. And not for the first time, I am sure many of my readers here will be nodding.

Mr. Gilmore, it is clearly time you drew in your Caribbean ladder and sought diversion- and entertainment-for-profit elsewhere. Your current efforts in the Caribbean are inappropriate and outlived, and any influence you might have had is now history.

Trumping all that, when King Patrick of Trinidad converted BWIA to Caribbean Airlines he already had his own lofty plans for ALL of Caribbean aviation which placed him as Supreme Commander and Trinidad as the Supreme Homeland of everything regional in the air from Guyana to the Bahamas.

Air Jamaica, LIAT, BahamasAir, Cayman Airways and more, they all were under his microscope for placing in his special test tube. These few were to be just the start..

But King Patrick is gone - Whoa!!! Long live King Patrick!!! - and his heir Queen Kamla has made it well known that His Supreme Majesty’s Supreme Plans are No More. If the other Kings of the region want to bring something together they are welcome to the plans and discussions we have here, created from the minds of regional aviation professionals, on this Forum.

Free of charge!!

Back to Mr. Gilmore… “International aviation consultants” - some direct from ICAO and the UN, no less - have been telling the Dominica government that night landing facilities are entirely possible for Melville Hall and Canefield, two airfields that are already dangerous enough to fly into during the day, but it will not be the “international aviation consultants” - or the local politicians - who will be on board the aircraft that crashes into the side of a ravine one dark and rainy night trying to achieve their impractical (and idiotic) objective.

Those “international aviation consultants” - if they were really doing their jobs properly - should have been telling the Dominican politicians to abandon such impractical ideas and put all of their energy and financing instead into a new international airport where they can have the higher-capacity (and longer distance) jet traffic at any time of the day or night.

But I don’t suppose “international aviation consultants” get paid for telling Prime Ministers what they do not want to hear, so these “international aviation consultants” spoke with forked tongues and ran with the money.

Here’s the thing… we in the region seriously don’t need any more “international aviation consultants” telling us convenient untruths in return for obscene payouts, whether they are long associated with the region or not. We especially don’t need any more “international aviation consultants” meddling in negotiations and applications between two sovereign countries who have nothing to do with said “international aviation consultants”.

Personally, I think it is high time the region and a whole stop paying extra-regional consultants - including contract managers - for anything and start focusing on regional talent when they need expertise.

I also think it is high time that regional governments and companies stop importing temporary hatchet men from outside the region to do the dirty work of firing workers and slashing companies. I am sure there are persons just as qualified in this area of the world to do the same jobs, even if they are to be found at the opposite end of the region - and so can take that job-generated bad will away with them when they leave just as effectively as an “ex-pat”.