The chocks are away, the engines fired, and the aircraft has begun its taxiing to the take-off runway.

Thus Air Malta.

But the destination is unknown not just to the passengers but also, one suspects, to the crew in the cockpit.

The airline has been engaged in tough discussions with the unions that represent segment after segment of the employees – the pilots, the cabin crew, the members of a union…

In each round, the employees threatened all sorts of actions, from strikes, to work to rules, etc. Each time the deadline came and the airline was not disrupted as many had feared.

Then a meeting was held with the airline top officials, the Minister for Tourism and the former president as a sort of mediator and in each and every instance the agreement was that no one of the employees would suffer any loss of earnings or of employment.

This kind of vague promise may mean many things – for instance that the employees will be put on the national budget. Whether this is State aid by another name and whether this is or will be allowed by the European Commission is not, to our reading, clear at all.

The main thing is that it has avoided colossal industrial strife.

This is more or less what was done when the Malta Drydocks closed down and the workers, many of them skilled labourers experts on ships, were sent to tend to flowers on roundabouts.

Even if industrial peace was sort of bought at this unquantifiable price, and if this sort of approach has quietened the various segments of the Air Malta employment, the rest of the Maltese business sector could not but be alarmed at the various changes to the traditional Air Malta business approach that will harm not just Air Malta’s core business but also the tourism sector in general.

For if Air Malta operates at a loss to some key destinations, that is only because the national tourism industry so requires.

If Air Malta focuses prevalently to the North, whereas there may be more business opportunities to the South, that is because Malta tries to attract tourists from the North.

The ministry has denied a report that Air Malta will be turned to face the South – in other words that it will add more routes to destinations in Africa. The ministry has also denied persistent reports that Alitalia, the carrier that is negotiating taking on a share of the Air Malta shareholding, looks on Air Malta as fulfilling primarily a feeder need.

So far, all these denials have said what Air Malta will not be but they have not clarified what Air Malta will be.

The fact that the Air Malta employees have been ‘bought off’ with so hazy and costly commitments should put us more and more on our guard that something momentous is coming and that the national airline is losing the key role it had with regards to national tourism.

Even at this late stage we still cannot understand why the government does not seem to hear the pleas that arise from many constituted bodies for the government to privatize the airline by offering shares to any who would want to buy them on the open market, instead of persisting with the search for a big partner who may well use us to its own benefits.

The fact that Malta is well-served by the many airlines, especially low-cost, that have flocked to Malta in recent years is no reason to jettison the national airline.

Now that the government has obtained the agreements with the workforce it needed, it should stop and think if it should continue negotiating with Alitalia or whatever, or do a U-turn and save the national airline from an agreement which clearly is not to its advantage. Nor to Malta’s advantage.