KINGSTOWN, St. Vincent, May 31, IWN – Regional airline LIAT is expected to take control today of the first of the ATR 72-600 aircrafts that will replace its aging Dash-8 fleet.
Chief Executive Officer of LIAT, Ian Brunton, told I-Witness News that the new aircraft is slated to arrive in the region early next month.
He declined commenting on the new aircraft even as photos of the plane published on LIAT’s Facebook page and another of the plane in flight published on an aviation website created some buzz .
“The aircraft are not in our possession as yet. We don’t take possession of the aircrafts until Friday, [May] the 31st. So, we can’t really say anything about the aircraft, they are not ours,” he told I-Witness News at a meeting here of CARICOM’s Council on Trade and Economic Development (COTED).
“We obviously have people at the factory looking at the final preparations and going through the records and going through the paperwork but we can’t say anything official about the airplane until we take control of it on Friday, the 31st,” Brunton said.
The ATR 72-600 can carry up to 72 passengers and can fly non-stop for up to 891 nautical miles at a speed of 275 knots.