With its tourism industry already hurting due to limited air and sea access into the island, Montserrat has suffered a further setback in getting more travellers to the island with the official grounding of FlyMontserrat. The airworthiness surveyor is to travel to Anguilla, where FlyMontserrat’s aircraft are serviced.

LIAT’s newly-appointed Chief Executive Officer, Captain Ian Brunton has described thirty-five percent of the airline’s 112 daily flights as “social (uneconomic) routes”. “LIAT cannot continue to meet the cost of these social routes,” Brunton told the CTO state of the industry conference in St. Kitts last week.