No reasonable grounds for an airstrip

Roy Perry in The Case For An Airstrip On Gozo (March 27) fails dismally to make a case for an airstrip on Gozo. This is certainly not due to incompetence on his part but to the simple fact that such a case can never be made on reasonable grounds.

Mr Perry may have been researching the matter since 1997, as he wrote, but this is hardly a good reason for building an airstrip on Gozo, nor is the suggestion - a dubious one, I must say - that the airstrip would take up land that is "mostly derelict" and with "very little soil cover". If we had to build an airstrip wherever these two characteristics exist in Gozo we would certainly make the island look like an unsinkable aircraft carrier!

However, Mr Perry's worst failure is to view the big picture, which is what some who support his idea can see quite clearly, including the opportunity to sacrifice yet another part of our environment for a few million euro to line their pockets.

An airstrip would purportedly help the tourism industry and Mr Perry admits that "those who will use the service are tourists and foreign residents" and in another part of his contribution concludes that "an air service would also be possible directly to European destinations within a 500-kilometre range." So, presumably we should be doing all this to create a direct link between Gozo and Naples, Palermo, Catania, Pantelleria, Lampedusa, Linosa and practically nowhere else, apart from Malta, of course. But one can hardly presume that the inhabitants of these places are waiting for a Gozo airstrip to fly out here for a holiday.

It is interesting to note that the number of beds in Gozo increased marginally for several years up to early 2008 when it peaked at around 1,700 beds (and there was no airstrip then). By the beginning of this year, this number dropped to around 1,100 beds, as hotels like the Andar and Mġarr were unceremoniously knocked down to make room for apartment blocks. So now, after reducing the bed stock in Gozo by more than a third, I suppose Mr Perry would have us build an airstrip to increase the influx of tourists which would in turn increase the demand for bed-places!

I have no doubt that there are quite a few shrewd speculators out there who would be terribly pleased with such prospects. And I have no doubt that Mr Perry is not one of them and that his intentions are well-meaning, but we all know where the road paved with such intentions leads to.