interCaribbean starts scheduled service to POS with all-female crew

Brent Pin­heiro

brent.pin­[email protected]

Women have al­ways played an im­por­tant role in Dr Lyn­don Gar­diner's life, even be­fore he be­came chair­man of In­ter­Caribbean Air­ways. He was raised by his moth­er in the Turks and Caicos af­ter his fa­ther aban­doned the fam­i­ly. His sis­ter taught him how to dri­ve. He start­ed an air­line with a sin­gle-en­gine Cess­na in 1991 to vis­it a woman in the Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic who would lat­er be­come his wife. And on Sun­day, Dr Gar­diner's goal of one day adding Trinidad to in­ter­Caribbean Air­ways' route map was ful­filled with three women op­er­at­ing the in­au­gur­al flight to Port of Spain.

The Em­braer ERJ145, op­er­at­ing as JY752, land­ed at Pi­ar­co In­ter­na­tion­al Air­port on Sun­day night, mark­ing the start of a four-times-week­ly ser­vice be­tween Trinidad and Bar­ba­dos. In the cock­pit, Cap­tain Lau­rie Chem­i­nade and First Of­fi­cer Xing Zhang and in the cab­in, Tri­na Clarke. Cap­tain Chem­i­nade told Guardian Me­dia that an all-fe­male crew was his­toric in more ways than one. "For many years, there was just me around in Turks and Caicos. Over the last few years, we have start­ed to have more and more fe­males... Not on­ly in the Caribbean, but we can hear them talk­ing on the ra­dio as well," she said. It's al­so about in­spir­ing the next gen­er­a­tion, even if they don't choose avi­a­tion ca­reers. "I have two daugh­ters, and I'm very hap­py that they see that they can do what­ev­er they dream of," Chem­i­nade said.

The de­ci­sion to have an all-fe­male crew for the in­au­gur­al flight was in­ten­tion­al. Ac­cord­ing to Dr. Gar­diner, this move aligned with both the tim­ing of the flight and In­ter­na­tion­al Women's Day. Speak­ing with Guardian Me­dia at Pi­ar­co In­ter­na­tion­al, he ex­plained, "When we con­sid­ered the time we were fly­ing, and [that] it was go­ing to be In­ter­na­tion­al Women's Day. We made sure to move around the sched­ule to fa­cil­i­tate an all-fe­male crew."

It's tak­en just over sev­en years of plan­ning to get to this point of wheels on the tar­mac at what is now in­ter­Caribbean Air­ways' 24th des­ti­na­tion. But Dr. Gar­diner is just get­ting start­ed. "We're look­ing at South Amer­i­ca and more of Latin Amer­i­ca be­cause we al­ready have an es­tab­lished tourism prod­uct which peo­ple in those re­gions come to the Caribbean for," he said. "And we in the Caribbean al­so go to a lot of those coun­tries for tourism as well as med­ical ser­vices and so there is a nat­ur­al flow of pas­sen­gers to/from those re­gions and we're def­i­nite­ly plan­ning to cap­i­talise on those and ex­pand on those ser­vices," Dr. Gar­diner added. To get there, the com­pa­ny will use its new­ly ac­quired Em­braer E170s that al­low in­ter­Caribbean to "go fur­ther, and faster".

Dr. Gar­diner nev­er ex­pect­ed his tiny char­ter op­er­a­tion to grow in­to the re­gion's largest pri­vate­ly owned air­line, but now that the mo­ment is here, he's meet­ing it head-on. “I keep re­or­gan­is­ing my strat­e­gy and grow­ing and de­liv­er­ing more of what I ini­tial­ly thought I would be do­ing, but I’m do­ing it on a much larg­er scale than I ever en­vi­sioned.”