It must also be viewed as being quite hurtful to the Caribbean Community of which BWIA has evolved as a vital link in regional air transportation, a symbol of our “Caribbeanness”, and integral to the success of the region’s tourism industry.

Guyanese, though continually complaining about the service it provides to them, nonetheless rely a lot on BWIA for flying them to and from Caribbean and international destinations.

Those inclined to see this embarrassing development simply within the context of a cash-strapped airline failing to honour debt obligations to one of its principal creditors, perhaps should reflect on the wider issue of how the seizure of the two planes could seriously undermine the credibility of an airline that has evolved over half a century as a flagship carrier of this region.

While Prime Minister Patrick Manning and his Trade and Industry Minister Kenneth Valley engage in public verbal dispute with the airline’s chief executive officer, Conrad Aleong, there remains the further danger of other creditors moving to add their own pressures on BWIA.

There may be more in the mortar than the proverbial pestle in this saga of BWIA’s poor management that resulted in last week’s embarrassing development of ILFC’s agents seizing the two planes and leaving passengers stranded.

Sufficient information has, however, emerged within the past two months to suggest that there are good grounds for urgent and radical intervention by the Trinidad and Tobago Government on a temporary new form of ownership.

Together with the 15 per cent shares it owns on behalf of the airline’s employees, the government has an estimated 49.5 per cent stakeholder interest in BWIA, once under state control.

Current action being contemplated includes possible speedy acquisition of at least one-and-a-half to two per cent more ownership shares to return BWIA to temporary state control.

One relevant area requiring examination is to ascertain the extent to which a major United States corporate entity like the American International Group (AIG) has been able to provide, if at all, management “guidance” to BWIA through representation by its subsidiaries on the board of directors of the national airline.

The subsidiaries are American Life and General Insurance Company (ALGICO), which operates in Trinidad and Tobago, and ILFC itself. AIG, either on its own, as the parent company, or through its subsidiaries, ALGICO and ILFC, has three directors on the Board of BWIA.