There is a very earthy version in Maltese which is politely translated as ‘Cutting off your nose to spite your face’

Consider the mysterious ways in which Air Malta moves.

Air Malta has been flying to Hamburg since 1992 or even earlier than that. Hamburg offered a good base, both itself as a city, as well as its surrounding hinterland.

Suddenly, last May, Air Malta stopped flying to Hamburg. No real reason has been given – it had very good load factors but perhaps the distance from Malta to Hamburg was just outside the three hour flying time benchmark.

So anyone in Hamburg who might have come to Malta in previous years and wanted to come again, or who was tempted to come, will have to either get a feeder plane from Hamburg to anywhere served by planes coming to Malta, or else drive 300 kms eastward to Berlin, or 400 kms south to Dusseldorf. Hardly attractive, you might say.

Now Hamburg has some quite interesting connections to Malta. It is the base of Lufthansa Technik, to begin with, and there are other companies with close connections to Malta.

It has been nurtured for years by MTA which established a base network to sell tours to Malta. Now all that has been thrown overboard.

Could it be that Air Malta, now operating with less planes, found itself strapped? Even though it did have planes to try out some experimental routes such as Algeria, Lebanon, Ukraine etc.

One plausible reason is that somehow Air Malta is preparing itself to take on board Etihad/Alitalia and this curtailing of flights to and from Hamburg dovetailed into the overall plan.

If this is so, it is nothing short of incredible. We all thought the overall plan was to strengthen the airline, not to hobble it. It is incredible that a route which is doing well gets shut down and nothing substitutes it. Who is calling the shots at Air Malta? People who have the interest of the airline at heart or people who maybe have the interests of another airline?

So now we know that Air Malta, besides losing slots, is also losing profitable routes.

At the end, as pointed out by correspondent Matthias A. Merzhäuser on this paper’s sister publication The Malta Independent on Sunday last Sunday, the upshot was that German airline Condor will be flying to Hamburg twice a week as from next Spring.

Thus those people who were interested in coming to Malta from the large Hamburg catchment area will be served – but not by the Maltese airline.

Even before the alliance with Etihad/Alitalia, the national airline has had its strategy taken out of its hands and is, most probably, following the strategy of its big partner-to-be.

We know this is provocative talk but it seems that, as we had predicted, once the different categories obtained what they wanted from the negotiations, all interest in what is going on has died down.

Why would otherwise in a normal business a healthy route be shut down?