After the despondency of the past years, there is a new spirit at Air Malta.

The depressing chain of austerity cuts, followed by further austerity cuts, followed by, you get it, further austerity cuts now seems over.

The first news was the appointment of a new board which includes a former top management player, Ray Sladden, who teams up with the son of another former top management player, Minister Konrad Mizzi.

Then came the announcement that the airline will reinstate the Frankfurt route, which was recently axed, a 'ridiculous' decision as MAHE termed it.

Then the other announcement that the airline intends to get another plane so as to be able to afford more routes.

All this is positive and those who took these decisions must be praised.

For those working with the airline, and for all the others who benefit from spillovers of the airline's operations, all this makes a wonderful change from the gloom and doom atmosphere engendered by so many austerity cuts.

Take another, far bigger airline, with whom Air Malta was at one point dementedly seeking a sort of merger, Alitalia, now facing the risk of either being sold off to rivals, such as Ryanair, or else being shut down. Imagine what the Alitalia employees must be feeling now.

But these three announcements must not remain alone. The airline's financial situation is still bad and now no outside help is allowed.

The airline must get a better revenue while competing with low cost carriers to sell seats.

The European rules on State aid are draconian and brought down Hungary's Malev airline.

Air Malta has many times been accused of having among the highest ticket prices around and also of not being consistent in deciding about them. People today can compare prices and act accordingly.

There was a time when Air Malta boasted it offered a sterling service, and that was before the time when they cut the hot meals and substituted it with the infamous bezzun.

But, truth be told, Air Malta was, and still is, one hopes to say, flexible and accommodating. One can still compare things in these times of low cost carriers and sometimes the cabin crews of other carriers are more pleasant and happy than the Air Malta ones who sometimes seem to have got upon the wrong side of the bed. And sometimes Air Malta crews surprise you with their friendliness and their smile. Malta is not a place usually associated with smiling shop assistants.

One cannot but help thinking that Air Malta's route decisions were sometimes wrongly taken or taken for the wrong reasons. Apart from Frankfurt, one may also mention Manchester which has a heavy presence of either Maltese or people who love coming to Malta.

Then too, Air Malta recently re-introduced Tunis but the times of the flights are in the middle of the night. This makes sense if the aim is to get the Tunisian passengers to catch a flight to Europe from Malta if they, that is, do not have a flight from Tunis to the same destination. Still, there's no harm in trying.

Air Malta is a national asset and its pains and impending demise were looked at with dismay. Now that there has been a sort of reprieve, the whole country must rally around and come to its help.