But airline keeps on flying.


Nauru's national airline, Air Nauru, has flown through some eccentric times since its formation in the 1970s to become the small and isolated republic's only international air link.

Last December 18, it reached rock bottom, short of closure, when at Melbourne after legal battles since May 2002 its sole Boeing 737-400 jet was seized by a court order for non-payment of loan installments to the United States Export-Import Bank.

About US$13.6 million was owed on the jet, ISLANDS BUSINESS understands.

The seizure left Nauru without a scheduled air service and caused difficulties for Kiribati, Marshall Islands and other places reliant on the airline.

Within a few days, aircraft were leased from sources like Air Vanuatu and Air Pacific to keep critical flights going. It is still is, says chief executive Geoff Bowmaker.

“We are looking for a longer type of solution that will get us back to covering our entire network.

“The solution we have at the moment is temporary whilst we source the right replacement aircraft for the one that was taken away from us. At the moment only some services are operated.

“We are only doing Nadi/Tarawa with Air Pacific on our behalf once a week instead of twice weekly and Brisbane/Nauru and Tarawa only once instead of twice weekly.

“Another temporary arrangement for Norfolk Island whilst we source a replacement and then come on and do what we used to do for Norfolk.”

Bowmaker says the intention is to return to the previous level of flying “because it's what we think is appropriate to the market and the needs as opposed to what's there to date. The skeleton arrangement is insufficient.”

“We just can't pick something from the shelf. The sort of flying we do is long over-water flying requiring twin ETOPS extended range operation. Not all aircraft are configured and have the right attributes. We have to identify an appropriate aircraft.”

Air Nauru won't go down. It's struggling but it has a future. “That's our position at the moment,” Bowmaker says. “We are backed by the Nauru government in that endeavour and there have been discussions between governments, Nauru and Kiribati, in particular, the Solomons and the Marshall Islands.

“They are all in my view appear solidly behind ensuring Air Nauru is maintained and got back to what it was doing previously.

“Money is a problem. It's a reduced operation so you trade off operating costs from a higher to a lower frequency,” Bowmaker says.

It is not ideal but we are getting by and in the foreseeable future we will be in a financial situation to continue what we are doing now.”

Air Nauru has traded reasonably well in recent years. Its financial difficulties were caused by the draining of cash by a desperate government as years of misgovernment reduced Nauru's two billion-dollar fortune to near zero.