Montserrat Locks In Its Lifeline: Three Flights a Week, Guaranteed for Three Years

The government signed a three-year agreement with WINAIR guaranteeing a minimum air link, the kind of deal that is mundane almost everywhere and existential on a volcano-scarred island.

The Government of Montserrat and the regional carrier WINAIR signed a three-year agreement guaranteeing at least three flights a week, locking in an air link that a small, isolated island cannot take for granted (Discover Montserrat, October 17). For most places a scheduled airline route is a convenience. For Montserrat it is closer to a utility, the thread that connects the island to the regional hub at St. Maarten and, through it, to the rest of the world.

The context is a catastrophe that reshaped the island a generation ago and still defines it. The eruption of the Soufriere Hills volcano in the 1990s buried the capital, Plymouth, destroyed the island's airport, and drove most of the population into exile, leaving Montserrat with fewer than 5,000 residents and a geography cut in half by an exclusion zone. The current airport at Gerald's, in the island's safe north, is small and the runway short, which limits the aircraft that can serve it and leaves Montserrat perennially vulnerable to any carrier deciding the route is not worth flying. A guaranteed three-flights-a-week floor, written into a three-year contract, is therefore a meaningful piece of economic security.

Air connectivity determines almost everything else on an island like this. It sets whether tourists can realistically visit, whether the diaspora can come home for a funeral or a festival, whether a business can get its people and its goods in and out, and whether residents can reach specialist medical care unavailable on-island. A thin or unreliable air link suppresses all of that activity before it can begin. By contracting a minimum service for three years, the government is buying predictability, the ability to tell a hotelier or an investor or a returning Montserratian that the planes will be there.

The island's week carried other signs of a small place managing outsized risks. A Royal Navy patrol vessel, HMS Trent, tested drones over Montserrat's volcanic exclusion zone and at Rendezvous Beach to explore disaster-response uses (Discover Montserrat, October 12), an experiment that makes particular sense on an island whose defining experience is a natural disaster and whose terrain includes a no-go zone that is dangerous to monitor by any other means. Drones that can survey the volcano or reach a cut-off area in an emergency are not a gadget here. They are a potential tool for exactly the kind of event Montserrat has already lived through once.

Montserrat's story is often told as tragedy, and the eruption was one. But the quieter, ongoing story is one of a community that chose to stay and rebuild in the habitable north, and of a government whose job is to secure the unglamorous essentials, air service, disaster readiness, basic connectivity, that let the rebuild continue. The WINAIR deal will not make headlines beyond the island. On the island, a guaranteed link to the outside world for the next three years is as consequential as any policy announcement a larger country could make, because it answers the most basic question a small, remote place faces: can you get there, and can you leave.