Press reports in the English media late on Tuesday 19 May http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/travel_news/article-3087560/ Thousands-passengers-stranded-London-City-Airport-forced-close-runway-pothole-tarmac.html refer and illustrate with several photos the chaos that occurred when the one runway London City Airport closed down because of what was described as a "hole in the runway". 

By a remarkable coincidence a number of "prophetic" questions which have been sent to MIA in anticipation of its Annual General Meeting raise the matter of the security and sustainability of the runway and pavement at Luqa airport.

Reference is made to what appears to be a "secret" report that the board of MIA commissioned some time in the second half of 2014 to address similar problems at Luqa aerodrome.

There are some incredible similarities between London City airport and Luqa airport in the fact that the latter too is constructed on reclaimed land.

The older generation will remember that the area was originally and naturally nowhere as flat as the Gudja side of the aerodrome appears to be today. Thousands and thousands of lorry journeys of stones and builders' rubble raised the troughs in the natural profiles and flattened that out to the semblance of a flat area on which a runway could be built.

It seems that all this had been forgotten until the time came to construct the new airport terminal at Gudja in the early 1990s. Soddenly some of  the early construction gave way, because the foundations had been erected on large pieces of rock and not on a solid rock base.

NACO BV the Dutch airport terminal construction consultants had to commission Delft Ground Radar, a Dutch company with an international reputation for radar ground surveys to re-map the site.

To everyone's dismay their conclusion was that the airport building had been designed to be built over naturally occurring faulty rock formations that formed part of a natural depression, and indeed in part over a disused quarry.

Before the building could be started afresh, refilling had to be resorted to, with the aid of pumping of thousands of tons of specially formulated grouting concrete to stabilise the underpinnings.

This remediation of that early mishap was one of the main factors that had raised the price of the finished terminal by several millions of Liri, from the original Lm9.5 million estimated price to the Lm18 million that were eventually paid out.

But back to the "secret" report which of course, is no secret anymore.  It is said by sources  that the report's findings are not completely credible because both its technical conclusions and cost forecasts are highly suspect, if for no reason because the study was given incestuously to a shareholder company in the consortium that owns the Malta airport company.

That a plc fails to issue a public tender for such a grave matter is bad enough, that it resorts to a direct order on the buddy-buddy system is worse, but that the study is awarded to a company that has been publicly known for years to have been active in trying to quit the partnership is sheer gross public irresponsibility.

What credence can be given to the technical facts "discovered"?. And more to the point how credible is the forecast capex that needs  to be spent, estimated at a little less than €100 million? Will it end up at twice the forecast at close to €200 million, as had happened to the construction of the new airport terminal in the 1990s?

The bare facts are that any passenger looking out of the window of any aircraft taking off and landing at Luqa can see for himself the cracks in the runway, even on some taxiways and the apron.

At this stage it would be well to point out that Malta airport is the one and only airway gateway to Malta, and to its life-giving Industries and to tourism, a double digit GDP contributor to our economy.

So what should be a national priority - keeping Malta one and only airport functional  - has become the backroom secret of a few boys at MIA and their Austrian bosses in Vienna.

And while we worry about what a problem ISIS could cause for Malta, these gentlemen are effectively threatening Malta much more than ISIS ever could.

Hopefully, the hole in the London City airport runway will serve as a wake-up call for the nation. Indeed it is time for the government to set up a Public Inquiry on the matter with a view to how such an important economically strategic asset for Malta is being mishandled by the Austrian boys with cigars at MIA plc.