THE newly established Jamaican all-cargo airline, Exec Direct Aviation, is looking to expand throughout the Caribbean with its single two-engine prop Saab 340A cargo aircraft.

    "We would like to be a regional carrier with our base in Kingston, passing everything through that hub to Cayman, connecting with Curacao, Nassau," Exec Direct chief operating officer Kamal Clarke said in a report from Cayman Island Compass.

    "We would like to become a major regional player in the cargo market. Right now we are talking with many of the islands and have communicated the routes that we would like to operate but of course we need the approval by our local authority in Jamaica and then the counter authority [in each territory]," he said.

    The company owns a Saab 340A cargo aircraft, which is capable of transporting 8,000 pounds of cargo for approximately 600 miles. The airline received certification to begin operations from the Jamaica Civil Aviation Authority on April 21 but the idea went back a little longer than that, Mr Clarke said.

    "I used to be in Turks & Caicos flying passenger airplanes and we found there was a demand for Jamaican products there but no real way to get them there. People always asked me to bring back stuff for them and it struck me that it could be a viable business.

    "With Air Jamaica reducing capacity on all the routes there was an opportunity for flying freight around the region," he added.

    The first route to be targeted is between Jamaica and Curacao, which was an obvious choice, he said. "Air Jamaica pulled out of Curacao, which was one of their bigger cargo routes. In Curacao there is a free zone and a lot of higglers [informal commercial importers and small scale distributors] used that route to buy their apparel and so on to bring back to Jamaica and sell it. So there was definitely a market there. The goods came from all over the place including Asia. And being a free zone, Curacao has the goods much cheaper than getting it out of the United States."

(Resource:http://www.shippingonline.cn)