Barbados must introduce the necessary equipment and policies to ensure that it no longer misses out on revenue from aircraft transiting the country’s upper airspace.
Minister of Finance Ryan Straughn said this was an important step the island needed to take considering that other CARICOM countries may be collecting money that rightfully belonged to Barbados.
“For as long as I have known myself, I have heard that there is another CARICOM country that has been collecting the revenue for planes transiting our airspace and therefore, if we are going to take what is ours, then we have got to up our game to make sure that when we assert that this is ours, that we have the capability to enforce,” Straughn said speaking during debate on the Civil Aviation Bill, 2026 recently in the House of Assembly.
He added: “And therefore these measures are important for us to be able to say, ‘well, when you look up in the sky and you see the plane passing in the higher altitude, they have got piece of change for Barbados’.
“But if we can’t validate that that is our airspace up there and that whatever the tail number of the aircraft passed in this time, then the little revenue for the Civil Aviation Authority they are going to come and ask me for the money.
“So I want them to get the equipment fast, to upgrade so that we can get that money and I am being very serious because as we are now repositioning . . . this country to take on more of this type of activity then I would expect, as we are bringing aircraft from Africa and the Middle East . . . from Latin America and the like, that we must know what is happening in our airspace.”
(SC)
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