A SPOKESMAN for Flybe vividly summed up the airport situation when he described it as ‘incompetence heaped upon incompetence’ and islanders – especially those wanting to use the multi-million pound facility over half-term – want to know what is being done to resolve what’s going on.

Whatever is done or said now, the damage remains. Moreover, this dispute that the fire crews say isn’t has been festering for more than two years and people are entitled to ask why it was not resolved before the disruption started.

More fundamentally, the lack of fire cover also raises the question of who actually is running the airport. The reason is Public Services’s attempt to bring in UK fire cover – only to have it blocked by the union Unite.

What business it is of a union to interfere in who Public Services employs is one thing, quite another that a States department is led by the nose by its own staff.

Further questions are raised about the  management of the airport by the sickness that is allegedly causing the problems there in the first place. Public Services had the poorest illness record in the States of Guernsey when the

National Audit Office discovered in 2006 that poorly managed governmental absences cost the taxpayer in excess of £6m. a year.

Public Services was the worst performing  department on two key indicators: percentage of working days lost, at 5% compared with a States average of 3.8%, and days sick per staff, at 11.4 compared with a States average of 8.7.

Much of the ‘sickness’ – as with the current fire crew absences – is uncertificated so no one knows whether it is genuine or not. Islanders, however, will have their suspicions about what appears to be a particularly virulent case of ‘weekend flu’ that is exacerbated in the presence of smaller  aircraft brought in by Flybe and which need fewer fire crew to land safely.

Given that and the cumbersome and ineffective third-party negotiation employed by the States, it is not surprising an independent review suggests freeing the airport from civil service bureaucracy.

It is high time that someone took charge of this fiasco.