The great Gozo airstrip scam

For a long time now I have suspected that there was an orchestrated effort on the part of a few individuals to give the impression that a large number of people were in favour of an airstrip on the island of Gozo. The obvious indicator of this initially, was the fact that every time the matter was raised the same small band of supporters appeared in the papers.

My attention was first drawn to a story entitled, Seaplane Will Not Resolve Access Problems - Gozo Tourism Association which appeared in the Gozo News on January 31, 2007. What raised my suspicions regarding this story was the number of viewings it received. It's not exactly what you would class as an important breaking story yet it has so far received almost 240,000 viewings. Not totally impossible in the given time I suppose, until you realise that the majority of these viewings took place in a matter of weeks.

When another story appeared in the Gozo News entitled, It Seems Unbelievable That Gozo Does Not Have A Working Airport, on March 8, I decided to test my suspicions. Now again this is not the type of story that is going to attract worldwide attention especially when you consider that the majority of the world population doesn't even know where Gozo is. Someone who thought the Maltese government should build an airstrip for his wife, as she had to endure a crossing from Gozo to Malta in gale force 8, supposedly wrote the story. Personally I'd rather be in a ship than a small plane in those conditions!

Anyway, I decided to push a few buttons and see what would happen. Sure enough, as the old saying goes, if you give them enough rope they'll hang themselves, and this little group have ended up well and truly hung. From nothing this story started to receive a lot of viewings. What do I mean by a lot? Well between publication March 8 and June 2 it had received somewhere in the region of 34,000 viewings. By Thursday, June 4, after I started backing them into a corner that number had risen to 84,000. That's over 1,000 viewings per hour, 25,000 viewings per day!

But it didn't stop there. By the following day this number had risen to 92,000 and a day later, on June 6, the number was up to over 101,000. By Sunday, June 7 the figures had reached 115,192, Monday, June 8, 128,255, and Tuesday, June 9, 128,768. I could go on listing figures here but let's just say that between Tuesday and Saturday the figure rose to 128,854. So, as you can see the viewings basically slowed to a halt from Tuesday with just 86 hits in five days or 17 hits per day, quite a difference from 25,000!

It would appear that the entire world is falling over itself with interest regarding an airstrip somewhere they have never heard of! Oh, and out of these 128,854 people interested in this breaking news story how many left comments? Just four actually, and all of those are against the idea. What then does all this go to prove? Well the answer to that is quite simple really. The vast majority of people from Malta and Gozo and indeed tourists like myself prefer Gozo just the way it is, peaceful and airstrip free. That's why we go there. However a small, and I emphasise the word small, group exists who have a vested interest in further destroying the island's historical and environmental infrastructure. This group want you to believe that their cause is a just one and is of interest to many, so for the past week or so they have been taking it in turns to artificially increase the apparent number of viewings for this story thereby giving the indication of an increasing number of interested people. Up until Tuesday anyway, when they must have decided that they had enough and the "world" stopped viewing the article! Sad people really.