NASSAU, BAHAMAS- Bahamasair spent ‘hundreds of thousands of dollars’ on free evacuations flights in the wake of Hurricane Dorian Tourism Minister Dionisio D’Aguilar said yesterday.
While those figures have not yet been quantified, D’Aguilar said the monster storm’s devastating impact lay bare the advantages of having a national carrier.
“It hasn’t been quantified into a number but I’m sure for as many days as they did it, and the number of flights, I’m sure it’s in the hundreds of thousands and the low millions,” he said.
‘Mobilizing the plane, the cost of fuel, the staff, all of it was a cost to the government but it is one of the advantages of why we have Bahamasair. Yes, Bahamasair costs the treasury a whole heap of money every year but it is in catastrophes like this when we can call on it to move our citizens from affected areas to non-affected areas. This is one of the advantages of having our own national carrier.”
Following Hurricane Dorian, Prime Minister Dr Hubert Minnis said the government would absorb the costs associated evacuations.
Initially there was some confusion about whether flights were free. However, the airline later released a statement, adding that previous communications about relief flights had been “misinterpreted”.
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