LIAT Operations Team lauded for emergency plans

Chief Executive Officer of LIAT Airlines, Julie Reifer-Jones expressed that she is proud of the emergency planning systems developed by the airline’s Operations Team.

The CEO’s comments came during a handing over ceremony, which took place at CIBC First Caribbean’s Headquarters yesterday evening. She explained that their Operations Team monitored the activity in the region in relation to hurricanes and systems and noted that once they have a track that indicated that a system would be developing into a storm or hurricane, then they make their assessments and decide where they should focus their energies.

For Irma, she noted that they moved the ten aircrafts to Barbados. However, before this relocation, they needed to plan ahead of time to protect any passengers that would potentially be caught in their decisionto shut down the network.

“In the case of Irma, we relocated all the aircraft to Barbados and relocated our operations team and part of the engineers; so we had quite a bit of activity happening in Barbados, so that we could continue to have the flight schedule in the south because the impact was more to the north,” she explained.

“Hurricane Maria was more of a challenge because the system moved through the South of the network and up to the north very quickly, strengthening as she moved. Very quickly we had to make those plans and move the aircraft to Trinidad to get the assets out of harms way. There was a lot of planning and logistics going on in the background in terms of preparing for the impact of the weather,” it was also stated.

She noted that usually the plan would be formed based on how strong the system is, so the operations team has been extremely busy during the past couple of weeks. The CEO commended the work of the Operations Team, because they were able to save all their airlines and not have any damage done to them as a result of the hard work done by the Operations Team.

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