Business
LIAT expected to resume flights after fire
A huge fire swept through a hangar of the regional carrier Leeward Islands Air Transport (LIAT) which is based at Antigua’s international airport, late on Sunday night and into early Monday, destroying one of the airline’s planes and briefly suspending flights.
The airline has said it expected all flights to operate normally on Monday from the VC Bird International Airport, which is also the main hub of its 21-destination network.
The hangar was unoccupied at the time and no one was hurt in the explosion.
“It is expected at this time that all flights will operate normally today (Monday),” LIAT spokesman Desmond Brown said in an update issued at 0215 EST. “A further update will be given at 1000 EST.”
It took more than three hours for firefighters and tenders from the airport and from stations around the island to contain the fire, as explosions continued to ring through the gutted hangar.
The fire broke out in Hangar Number One, which sits adjacent to the runway, destroying the facility and the aircraft it housed, together with two office buildings, however, neighboring offices and the airline’s cargo facilities were not affected.
The hangar, which sits on the site of LIAT’s original headquarters complex, is used for the maintenance of the airline’s fleet of 18 Canadian-made Bombardier Q-400 and deHavilland Dash-8 aircraft. The airline’s administrative office had shifted to another part of the airport.
The destroyed plane, registration V2-LGH, was undergoing a routine maintenance check at the time, according to radio reports.
“The company is working with the investigative authorities of Antigua and Barbuda as well as the Eastern Caribbean Civil Aviation Authority (ECCAA) to ascertain the cause of the fire,” the airline spokesman said in a statement.
Most flights in LIAT’s network fan out in the early morning hours from LIAT hubs at Antigua’s VC Bird and Barbados’ Grantley Adams airports.
The raging fire forced the Antigua & Barbuda Airport Authority to suspend operations at VC Bird until firefighters had managed to put it out and an initial assessment could be carried out.
The fire comes as a blow to the 56-year-old island-hopping carrier, owned by the governments of Antigua & Barbuda, Barbados and St Vincent & the Grenadines, which has been saddled with financial and industrial relations problems over the years. – CMC