Stand and Wait with LIAT...

So far, all of our internal Caribbean flights have been with LIAT, but we have now completed our itinerary with that airline..

We have observed LIAT's particular strategy for quickly unloading and reloading flights with passengers. In the departure lounge, they announce boarding even before the aeroplane has landed, and make all the passengers stand in line where they are checked. If they do not have a full compliment of checked-in passengers, they make repeated announcements about "immediate boarding" to get those missing persons into the queue.

When everyone is standing in line (this can take 10-20 minutes), they march everyone out onto the tarmac en masse, still before the plane is in sight. The crowd waits patiently for the aircraft to arrive, and when it does, you wait for it to be unloaded. The second the last passenger is off, the new passengers get boarded. It's sure a quick process, although tiring for the paying customers!

The process is varied somewhat at LIAT hubs like Barbados and Antigua, where they may be loading multiple planes in a quick sequence, about 5 minutes apart. In this case, they form a number of queues of the complete passenger manifest, and march them onto the tarmac in groups, out of one gate. We were impressed by the efficiency of this process, but it's not that convenient for the punters.

We had a three hour layover at Barbados Airport whilst travelling from Martinique to Antigua. This is a big and spacious airport, and handles full-sized jets from USA and Europe. We saw none of these, obviously the timing was wrong, but the tiny LIAT lounge processed maybe a dozen incoming and outgoing flights while we were there. When leaving Antigua for Tortola, we saw United and American send large aircraft to the US, and then LIAT took over the airport with their unique hub loading strategy.

LIAT's fleet consists of old and new turbo-prop aircraft, probably ideal for the short hops and relatively small numbers of inter-island passengers travelling. The old aircraft are Dash-8's (like Qantas fly to Lord Howe Island) but they stink of fish and rice. We were amused by this, because there is no suggestion of any in-flight service, not even a drop of water, so the food must have been brought on board by passengers. The new aircraft are ATR42-600 & ATR72-600 (French-Italian made) and these are being introduced in 2014 and we were lucky to fly on one. They are much sweeter smelling!

LIAT's newest aircraft, the ATR72-600.

Maybe the highlight of our LIAT flights was the landing in Dominica whist enroute from Barbados to Antigua. The plane flys eastwards down a narrow steep-sided valley of lush tropical vegetation. You get the feeling the wing-tips on either side could touch the trees! Then it pulls up at the end of a runway which ends abrubtly in the ocean. It is notable that one of the rescue vehicles parked at this one-strip airport was a boat! And, enroute from Antigua to Tortola we had a stopover in St. Martin, the island shared by the Dutch and French. The airstrip here is famous for the spectacular views it provides people in apartments, bars and beaches nearby. A large sign beside the runway celebrates "70 years of spectacular landings"!

St. Martin's landing strip taken through a dirty and crazed LIAT Dash-8 window.

We have found the airports which service these LIAT flights to have quite reasonable facilities for waiting passengers, even the tiniest ones (like Castries, St Lucia), and even very early in the morning. We've been able to get a decent coffee/tea and a snack at pretty well all of them. Some Australian rural airports could learn from this.