Operating a low-cost airline

With reference to Frank Salt's article (Low-Cost Airlines, January 30), I can say that before I started out in April 2000, one-way tickets did not exist so one had to pay the same price as a return and not half the price as today.

Mr Salt was honest enough to say that he knows little about running an airline. But he was correct to say that the profits before were extraordinary.

With regards to safety, I can reassure the public that EU airlines must comply with EU safety standards which are much higher than they were five years ago.

When a country starts a new national airline they do a code-sharing agreement with the airlines of the country that they are going to operate to. I call this a cartel, as they agree on the price and it doesn't matter how many seats remain empty. The charter airlines also tried to form a cartel but they were doing special offers from time to time, the same as Britishjet.com is doing today. However the Maltese were not allowed to travel on a charter.

Today, politicians make sure not to name Britishjet.com and TV stations make sure that whenever they feature an aircraft of any airline at the airport they don't feature Britishjet.com. That was the price Britishjet.com had to pay for giving the Maltese low-cost flights and for destroying the cartel.

In the UK Freddie Laker started the first low-cost airline but British Airways destroyed him. Shortly afterwards Richard Branson started Virgin Airlines and BA also tried to destroy him with a dirty campaign. But he took them to court and won.

Ryanair & Easyjet have gone through similar dirty campaigns, and so have I. Nobody can stop low-cost airlines from coming to Malta as all European airlines can operate to Malta. All they have to do is to notify the Maltese authorities that they are coming. The problem is that Malta is a very small market so it is not feasible to operate unless they take the whole market or most of it.

Britishjet.com has not only given the Maltese people the opportunity to travel at low prices, lower than many other countries, but has given tourism a big boost by bringing a total of nine per cent of all tourism to Malta, thereby being responsible for nine per cent of the 40,000 jobs which is equal to 3,600 jobs.