If there is one rare thing everyone in this country would agree upon, it is that they want to see Air Malta survive. The airline is as integral to the fabric of the island as our flora and fauna.
Yes, if the airline disappears tomorrow there will be others vying to fill the empty spaces. Ryanair has certainly made big inroads into the Malta market in recent years.
But, though they can have cheap fares, airlines of this nature have absolutely no commitment to Malta, which means they will leave the moment a route does not make commercial sense. And they certainly do not have the slots at major airports that allow the Maltese to do business in European cities and enjoy swift connections to the rest of the world. For a small island faced with insularity issues, this is vital.
Yet at the same time, no one can escape from the reality that the airline has been a heavy loss-maker for years and will miss the target set in a restructuring plan in 2011 to break even by March next year.
Chairwoman Maria Micallef announced that Air Malta had made a loss of €16.4 million for the financial year ending March 2015, though she added that that figure would drop to €4 million for the coming financial year. Furthermore, she expected to see the airline break even by 2017 and become profitable by 2018.
Unfortunately, this forecast was laced with a few inevitable ‘buts’. First is that there should be no unforeseen “circumstances”, though it is not clear what she had in mind. Fuel price rises? Sudden drop in passengers due to increased competition? Or could she have had in mind a failure to push through more cost-cutting measures?
Ms Micallef said that experts were adamant that workforce productivity at the airline must increase by 25 per cent. Yet this raises the question: will one employee increase their productivity by doing the work of another who is no longer there?
There is no doubt that all unions associated with the airline need to recognise the precarious situation it is in and accept that, by not accepting certain changes, they would only be jeopardising their members’ livelihood. This means not issuing silly directives such as refusing to serve passengers from the trolley, as that can only aggravate customers.
Yet the airline needs to be aggressive too. It must shed all the unnecessary elements that still make up Air Malta – the airline should concentrate on flying – and resist at all costs the government’s attempts to bloat this problematic company with more and more politically-favoured employees. This phenomenon has plagued Air Malta for years and does so to this day.
Meanwhile, it needs to make better use of modern means of technology – it’s website is cumbersome and it still, quite amazingly in this day and age, lacks an mobile phone application.
And of course, it must be able to stand on its two feet in the real sense, as next year it will not have a Selmun Palace to sell for €10.9 million. Nor will it be able to make another €4 million saving on its catering contract. This will require tough decisions.
For all the talk about the airline, its best hope for the future still lies in finding a strategic partner. The government has said that it has discussed this possibility with a couple of interested parties, but reaching a successful conclusion is now urgent because time could well be running out.