Trinidad travelers affected by Boeing 737 MAX grounding

Passengers walk through the Piarco International Airport yesterday, hours after the US announced it had grounded all Boeing 737 Max aircraft worldwide.

(Trinidad Guardian) Scores of peo­ple hop­ing to get to Mi­a­mi from Pi­ar­co In­ter­na­tion­al Air­port were get­ting ready to board their flight around 3 pm yes­ter­day when they were turned back and told to leave the de­par­ture gate.

Mo­ments ear­li­er, Unit­ed States Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump had ground­ed all Boe­ing 737 Max planes with im­me­di­ate ef­fect, leav­ing those pas­sen­gers who were set to leave for the Unit­ed States at 3.25 pm on Amer­i­can Air­lines flight num­ber 2703 strand­ed at Pi­ar­co.

An­oth­er flight des­tined to leave Mi­a­mi for Port-of-Spain at 5.55 pm (on Wednes­day) yes­ter­day, flight num­ber 2713, was al­so can­celled.

To com­pound mat­ters for many of the pas­sen­gers, of­fi­cials were not im­me­di­ate­ly avail­able to clar­i­fy what would hap­pen next, lead­ing to a slight furore at the desk. Po­lice were called in to en­sure that the sit­u­a­tion did not es­ca­late.

One pas­sen­ger with a tick­et for the 3.25 flight bought via the miles sys­tem was told to can­cel the tick­et and seek a re­fund. How­ev­er, he like many did not know when they would get an­oth­er flight on the air­line out of Trinidad. He said the next avail­able flight to him was list­ed as March 30.

Passengers walk through the Piarco International Airport yesterday, hours after the US announced it had grounded all Boeing 737 Max aircraft worldwide.

How­ev­er, AA of­fi­cials at the Port-of-Spain tick­et cen­tre told the T&T Guardian that the air­line would be work­ing to en­sure their ser­vice is not dis­rupt­ed to­mor­row. The su­per­vi­sor at the fa­cil­i­ty said the air­line will as­sess its op­tions with re­gards to equip­ment to en­sure their flights from Trinidad and To­ba­go will not be af­fect­ed. They urged pas­sen­gers sched­uled to leave Trinidad on flights with the air­line to check their web­site for up­dates about their sched­ule.

Amer­i­can Air­lines al­so post­ed a state­ment in the wake of the US Pres­i­dent’s de­ci­sion. It said: “On March 13, the Fed­er­al Avi­a­tion Ad­min­is­tra­tion (FAA) ground­ed all US-reg­is­tered Boe­ing 737 MAX air­craft, in­clud­ing the 8 and 9 vari­ants, as a pre­cau­tion­ary mea­sure. This in­cludes the 24 MAX 8 air­craft in the Amer­i­can Air­lines fleet. We are com­ply­ing with the FAA di­rec­tive.”

AA said it op­er­ates 85 flights per day on the MAX 8, out of 6,700 de­par­tures through­out the Amer­i­can Air­lines sys­tem.

The com­pa­ny de­fend­ed its safe­ty record and al­so list its sta­tis­tics us­ing the Boe­ing air­craft stat­ing, “Amer­i­can has flown more than 2.5 mil­lion pas­sen­gers — dur­ing 46,400 op­er­at­ing hours en­com­pass­ing near­ly 18,000 flights — safe­ly on our MAX 8 fleet since the first one was de­liv­ered Sep­tem­ber 2017 and be­gan com­mer­cial ser­vice lat­er that No­vem­ber.”

The on­line post added, “We apol­o­gise for the in­con­ve­nience this may cause some of our cus­tomers. Our team will work with all cus­tomers im­pact­ed by these flight can­cel­la­tions in or­der to re­book them to their fi­nal des­ti­na­tion. Af­fect­ed cus­tomers may re­book them­selves on aa.com by re­triev­ing their reser­va­tion or us­ing our mo­bile app. If a flight is can­celled, cus­tomers may re­quest a full re­fund by vis­it­ing our web­site. Cus­tomers who booked through a trav­el agent are re­quest­ed to con­tact their agency di­rect­ly.”

Coun­tries that ground­ed the Boe­ing Air­craft in­clud­ed Aus­tralia, Chi­na, In­done­sia, Malaysia, Mon­go­lia, Oman, Sin­ga­pore, South Ko­rea, the Unit­ed King­dom, USA and Trinidad and To­ba­go.

In a state­ment on so­cial me­dia yes­ter­day, Min­is­ter of Fi­nance Colm Im­bert said, “Un­til Amer­i­can Air­lines can find oth­er planes, the MIA-POS route is sus­pend­ed, since AA was us­ing the Max 8 for the TT route. But CAL will con­tin­ue to fly its 737-800s.”

Caribbean Air­lines cor­po­rate com­mu­ni­ca­tion man­ag­er Dionne Ligoure mean­while said it was too ear­ly to say if the lo­cal air­line would see an in­crease in pas­sen­gers as a re­sult of Trump’s de­ci­sion.

She said, “Caribbean Air­lines of­fers the most ser­vices to South Flori­da, and is open for busi­ness and will hap­pi­ly trans­port any­one will­ing to trav­el to and from Mi­a­mi. We con­tin­ue to close­ly mon­i­tor our in­ven­to­ry and book­ings in this re­gard.”