The Editor, Sir:

While this is the first time I'm writing about your national airline, it is by no means the first time I'm experiencing its colossal inefficiency. Not that I haven't worked around it. I have learnt to give myself a three-day grace period for both outgoing and incoming travel and I carry on all my luggage. That way I neither missed my daughter's graduation nor did I have to attend it sans attire.

So my dear uncle departs this life; his funeral is Saturday, and I travel on Thursday. I'm going from Barbados to Miami, with a one-hour layover in Kingston. I get into Kingston 15 minutes behind schedule (2:15 p.m for a 3 p.m flight) and here begins the ordeal. Nearly 300 persons, many of them senior citizens, with connecting flights are made to assemble in an airless corridor.

Painful feeling

The crowd shuffles forward painfully slowly. After about an hour I go to the top of the line to see what's happening. A single immigration officer is attending to each passenger. Immigration? I think not. I'm not landing in Jamaica. What's the deal here? By this time 3 p.m. has long gone and people on my connecting flight and others scheduled for around the same time are wondering aloud what the dickens is going on. No one from Air Jamaica is in evidence.

I get to the top of the line at 3:35. The immigration officer, joined since by another, is there simply to ask people their name and connecting flight number (both of which are on the boarding pass) and search for that information on a long list then tick it off. 'What', I ask her incredulously, 'is the object of this exercise'?

"What do you think it is?" She fires back.

"Lady if I could understand such stupidity I wouldn't ask."

"Ma'am, Air Jamaica requires us to check that the people whose names are on this list and those travelling are one and the same."

I guess they didn't check that in Barbados and people can switch identities in mid-flight.

So she finds my name and ticks it off. Ah, now here's an Air Jamaica agent.

"What is the status of my flight?"

"Oh it's boarding now so you'd better hurry."

But there's another security check, and the gate is half a mile away. By this time my name is being blast over the intercom in a final request that I board the plane immediately or my luggage (not that I have any) will be removed. A security officer sees my distress, lets me through a detour corridor and runs ahead to stop the plane, which is indeed about to close its doors. I get there panting and ask the agent why in the name of all that is sensible they don't move people with imminent flights to the top of what is in any case a senseless line. Immigration, she tells me, will not let them do that. So if your flight is at 7 p.m. and you happen to be at the top of the line lucky you, if it's at 3 p.m. and you're at the back, tough. And there are people behind me scheduled to travel on the same flight. And the plane, by the way, is half empty.

Sir, I have the greatest sympathy for Caribbean airlines in this unfriendly global environment. But some things can not be attributed to the high price of oil, and this is one of them. Please, divest it quickly if you can find a willing enough patsy.

I am, etc.,

CHERYL FLETCHER

fletcherc@hotmail.com

Lowther's Lane

St George's, Grenada