apr-2017c

94 95 AT A GLANCE INTERCARIBBEAN AIRWAYS WHAT: A regional airline and group of air services companies WHERE: Providenciales, Turks and Caicos Islands WEBSITE: www.intercaribbean.com later we were having the same conversation about me always being missing on a Friday. So I said to him, ‘Well, I don’t have an airplane.”And he said, ‘How much does that cost?’ It was about twenty-something thousand dollars, so I said, ‘I have six thousand and could he lend me the difference?’ I guess I was a good employee - he agreed to lend me the money. I bought my first airplane and I con- tinued to work for the bank and do some flying. “One Friday afternoon at the airport, where the residents and local people hang out, a friend who owned a photo studio said, ‘There’s a billfish tournament, tomorrow.Why don’t you take me out in the airplane? You can take the door off, fly low and slow. I’ll get some pictures and I’ll compensate you for the costs.’ So, I agreed and the next morning we flew about thirty or forty minutes and turned around and came back. He got the pictures he wanted and when we landed, he gave me five hundred bucks. It was the crispiest five hundred dollars I had ever seen. So, I INTERCARIBBEAN AIRWAYS called my manager and told him, ‘I quit.’ He was not very happy about that, and called in his loan. That meant I was com- pletely on my own. “Back in the day, I would hang out at the airport and operate a sort of taxi service. I was not properly licensed at the time; I was a private pilot. But, we’d all be out there on the hustle - getting passengers and taking them to the other islands, which were not very far from one another. On one of my trips back, I met the Deputy Director of Civil Aviation and, as I was coming off the airplane, he warned me about taking passengers for hire. Of course I told him that these people that I had were all friends and family and people that I knew forever. He questioned all three people I was flying in my Cessna 172, and no one agreed with him that I was getting paid. So, he told me, ‘Look, I’ll make a deal with you, because if anything happens to this airplane, you’re in trouble and we’re in trouble.’ I said, ‘I can understand why I’ll be in trouble, but why would you be in trouble?’ He said, ‘Because we’re from the CAA and we’re supposed to be pro- tecting the public interest and it would not look that we were protecting the public interest if we just allow you to fly around without a proper air operator’s certificate.’ So, he said, ‘You come to my office and I’ll show you what you need to TREVOR SADLER, CEO LYNDON R. GARDINER, CHAIRMAN