Another road death: Barbados Police cannot test if school bus driver had been drinking

What is the likelihood that the driver of a bus carrying 46 students was hung-over from a late night drinking session? Your guess is as good as mine, and as good as the guess of the police officers who investigated a fatal collision on Friday morning.

How much the bus driver had been drinking the night before, if anything at all, will remain a guess because both DLP and BLP governments in their time promised to implement breathalyzer equipment and legislation, but did not do so. Our police therefore have no law allowing them to administer a breath test to drivers involved in serious collisions. Third rate. Third world.

After at least 15 years of broken promises, we have to conclude that our politicians don’t want effective anti-drunk driving laws on the books.

Here are a few of our previous stories on this topic. Have a read and ask yourself how the DLP differs from the BLP when it comes to minding the safety of our children as they travel to school each morning…

November 28, 2010: Barbados road deaths: 240% higher rate than UK

December 29, 2009: Another Drinking Driver gets off easy because Barbados Police lack Breathalyzers

Full list of BFP’s Breathalyzer news stories

Photo courtesy of Barbados Today

Nation news story “totally erroneous, spin to make up for Virgin Atlantic’s disastrous Barbados cuts”

“BA Boost” is B.S.

The Nation article “BA Boost” is totally erroneous and appears to be nothing more than spin to make up for yesterday’s disastrous news that Virgin Atlantic is cutting seat capacity to Barbados by 3,000 seats a month.

‘BRITISH AIRWAYS (BA) is projecting a good winter season for its Barbados business, with more than 2000 passengers arriving here every week.’ (from The Nation article BA Boost)

The airline is in fact operating 10 flights per week using B777 aircraft with 226 seats, a TOTAL of 2,226 seats in every plane is full, a near impossibility. A previous Nation news story about a British Airways flight grounded at Grantley due to a bird strike revealed that the London-bound flight only had 100 passengers on board. That again shows how much of this current BA announcement is spin.

As the airline operated 12 flights per week last winter, today’s announcement is in fact a reduction of capacity, but the public apparently must not be told the truth: nevermind that the truth about the tourism industry is visible throughout Barbados.

Our tourism ‘leaders’ act as if we were still in those magic days when the Concordes of British Airways declared Barbados to be the number one island destination in the world – when the crowds were beating down the doors just to spend a week or two in Bim.

BA boost

BY GERCINE CARTER

BRITISH AIRWAYS (BA) is projecting a good winter season for its Barbados business, with more than 2 000 passengers arriving here every week.

The airline’s winter season operations began last month with ten weekly direct London-to-Barbados return flights and district manager Nigel Blackett said already the passenger loads were “encouraging”.

The BA aircraft has  a seating capacity of 226 and there is an expected boost in business with  a weekly air/sea exchange of cruise ship and airline passengers, starting November 16.

This will see close to 200 cruise ship passengers taking a BA flight back  to London from Barbados, while a similar number  of BA passengers  will join the cruise ship in Barbados.

… from The Nation BA Boost

Concorde over Barbados stamp image courtesy of George Wu, Taiwan, Republic of China (George has a wonderful website for aviation enthusiasts)

Further Reading

Barbados prepares to bid farewell to Concorde – 11/8/2003

Courtesy of ConcordeSST.com

With the last scheduled supersonic flight to Barbados set for August 30th, the people of this Caribbean island are preparing to bid farewell to the icon that has graced their island for nearly 15 years, and that has helped to build their very successful tourist industry.