Founding Air Jamaica: Postcolonial Aspirations for, and American Resistance to, Freedom of the Skies

During decolonization, forging a national airline became an important mechanism for, and potent symbol of, a new country’s modernization. As historian Jeffrey Engel notes, “It is little exaggeration to say that countries established during this period required three things before they could claim true sovereignty: an army, a flag, and an airline.” (Cold War at 30,000 Feet, 6) Jamaica, as an island nation heavily reliant on tourism, strove for a decade to launch Air Jamaica, hoping thereby to foster greater national control of its tourism sector for the post-independence era.

My analysis of archives in Kingston, Washington, and London, reveals the diplomatic struggles encountered by the Jamaican government, primarily from the United States’ Civil Aviation Board and Pan American Airways. Jamaica’s close alliance and economic partnership with the US did not forestall American actions that delayed Air Jamaica’s creation and ultimately damaged its long-term viability. Indeed, as hard-nosed US aviation policies converged with the global recession in 1974, Air Jamaica ceased being a fiscally-disciplined, profitable enterprise and thereafter burdened state coffers. Interestingly, it was American intransigence, even more than Jamaican mismanagement, that facilitated this failure.

The commercial aircraft that link the world’s various nodes of economic productivity serve as the sinew enabling globalization. Ostensibly, these air routes are no country’s domain, protected by the 1944 Chicago Convention’s various “freedoms,” which guarantee some modicum of access—and even a measure of parity—to each country’s airlines. In Jamaica’s experience, however, both a US government agency and a US airline sought to retain America’s aerial predominance over Jamaica and the entire Caribbean region. Indeed, Air Jamaica’s failed legacy demonstrates that the ostensible “freedoms” of globalization remained elusive for the world’s (poorer, racially-other) postcolonial states, even those allied with the United States, at least in the realm of aviation.