After years and years of constantly cutting and reducing itself, better times seem to be coming for the national airline, judging at least from what Minister Konrad Mizzi said in a parliamentary reply.

It was death by a thousand cuts and its results were never those expected.

The cuts began with reducing the airline’s number of planes. Then planes, like anything else, had problems and so the airline found itself short of one or two planes. They go temporary replacements and passengers waiting for an Air Malta livery found themselves faced with a completely different livery. And service.

Then the meals were cut and the bezzun appeared. Air Malta’s former pride of offering a sterling service took a deep dive. The bezzun was a symbol of an impoverished airline, an airline which had fallen upon a bad period.

Then we had a revaluation of routes and destinations. Frankfurt, one of the first important destinations of the airline was suddenly cut. The decision was said to be ‘in favour of a better utilization of routes, planes and destinations’.

Now, a change of the minister later, the decision seems about to be reversed. As we report on pg 1, the Air Malta commercial team is studying the possibility of reopening the Frankfurt route..

Minister Mizzi was replying to a supplementary question asked in Parliament by PN MP Robert Arrigo, regarding the Frankfurt route.

And it is not the Frankfurt route, however prestigious, that may be getting a reprieve.

The Air Malta team, the minister said, was evaluating the possibility of opening a number of routes, as well as others which were closed down in the past.

These may be early days and anyway no minister in the same government would dare reverse the decisions taken by his predecessor in a blatant manner. One expects the minister and his team to flesh out his policy programme and to come up with a coherent plan for the airline.

This is the time for all the stakeholders in the tourism sector to come alive and to bombard the minister with their suggestions. For quite a long time, in the very recent past, an air of resignation seemed to have come upon not just Air Malta but all those who in one way or another had to deal with the national airline. The same air of resignation seemed to impregnate the airline itself, from its crews and ground handling to all those connected with marketing and public relations.

At the same time, there is still a huge amount of goodwill in Malta for the national airline. It is not just a symbol of national pride but also the only ai4rline whose reason for its existence is to bring people to Malta.

Over the past years, as death by a thousand cuts was bringing the airline to its knees, resignation smothered everything and it all seemed inevitable. Death would follow in the short or medium term, everyone felt.

Now it seems that this horrible death may not be so inevitable. We hope we are not reading the signals in a wrong way and that this short ministerial reply is the harbinger of a new era for the airline.