Airstrip would only spur development

In his contribution Unreasonable Arguments Against Gozo Air Strip (April 12), David Carrington attributes to me an assertion I did not make.

I did not postulate that "the derelict land around the area of the heliport should be unutilised". I wrote that the land around the heliport may not be as derelict as Mr Perry made it out to be in the first place and in any case, even if it were, it would be unreasonable to suggest building an airport on Gozo just because we happen to have some derelict land.

I also wrote that the number of beds in Gozo has decreased by a third, as hotels were demolished to build apartment blocks, and that an airport would only fuel more development to replace the missing beds. Mr Carrington suggests that this argument is "simplistic" but in the same thread he mentions the "many tourist homes and some very upmarket developments going on". It appears that one reason why Mr Carrington wants an airport on Gozo would be to ensure that these "upmarket developments" are successful. Presumably, Mr Carrington would like us to believe that, once that happened, no other developer would try another "upmarket development".

Readers may remember Mr Perry's suggestion that an airport could connect Gozo to places within a radius of 500 kilometres. I suggested that this range would be so limited that it should fail to provide a large enough catchment area. The inference was that the next step would be to lobby for larger facilities to cater for longer range flights.

Mr Carrington unwittingly confirms this. He writes that in Ragusa "a hotelier has built his own airstrip... and gets business from France". In mainland France, the nearest airport to Ragusa is at Saint-Laurent-du-Var - 1,000 kilometres away. It appears that we are already looking forward to an airport catering for longer ranges, and this even before we have decided whether we want to build one or not!

So, in trying to show my arguments as unreasonable, Mr Carrington actually reinforced them and confirmed that an airport on Gozo would serve only to create pressure to overdevelop the island which, notwithstanding the numerous empty buildings that exist there, is already undergoing development on monstrous proportions. After the first wave of overdevelopment, we will get a repeat of the same arguments for bigger airport facilities which in turn would spur another wave of overdevelopment, and so on in a never-ending vicious cycle until we ruin the entire island as we did Malta.