We have by now got used to the various statements by Minister Edward Zammit Lewis with regards to the hot potato dumped in his lap – Air Malta.

Up till last Friday, when the government finally admitted what everyone had long known – that the deal with Alitalia is dead in the water, he had bluffed his way and tried to convey the impression that everything in his hands was OK. Everything was confidential, of course, and the minister religiously trotted out the misdeeds of the preceding government as a sort of justification.

He did it again yesterday in Parliament. He spent half the time of his ministerial statement to attack the Opposition and its past. Pathetic. He again expressed his determination to move on and spoke of an Air Malta ‘re-birth’.

Lost in the fog of his speech, one glimpses two possible outcomes. Plan A is to find another strategic partner. Plan B is to go it alone.

Let us go two or more steps back. Given the lack of audited accounts, we have no idea about the real state of the airline. Claudio Grech yesterday asked if the airline has been getting additional terminal charges.

The next question is who would want to take on a small, ailing, airline with all these issues? In a way, Alitalia, given our neighbourly relations could have been the ideal partner, but it is on life support itself. And for some time it seemed to be quite tempted to use Air Malta prevalently as its feeder airline. Definitely, it was not a marriage made in heaven. Maybe we should have seen it right from the beginning, as some did.

Next: what feasible options does the airline have? It is in intense competition with larger, more focused, leaner, airlines who have now moved in to take over many of Air Malta’s choice routes – London, Rome, Catania, etc.

There is a vast area of public opinion in Malta . including the Opposition, that seems to believe that privatising the airline and taking on partners from the business community will succeed where taking on a strategic partner failed. We are not so sure. If it makes business sense for an entrepreneur to join in the running of the airline, what is to stop this entrepreneur and his allies from setting up an airline without all the historical baggage that Air Malta has?

Plan B is to go it alone. This is hard, very hard, and mostly on hard ground, but maybe it can work, maybe it is the only alternative at least for now…

The minister, when pressed, said there are quite a number of hard decisions, some of which can impinge on tour operators or hoteliers, and these will be taken. Now that’s talking. It had to be the collapse of a bad deal with Alitalia to lead the government to this step. We await developments. Any decision that contributes to Air Malta’s regeneration is a good one.

Having said this, we are still not sure that all the stakeholders in the airline feel the urgency and the precariousness of the situation and most of these, let’s call them, recalcitrant stakeholders come mainly from the ruling party’s wide constituency and have a big clout at that.