Story ID: 643
Cayman Sees Increase in Bizav Visitors
By: Ian Sheppard
Caption: Only an hour from Florida, the Cayman Islands represents a low-cost, low-bureaucracy base for international businesses.
Word Count: 241
The government of the Cayman Islands, a British overseas territory situated to the south of Cuba that rolled out its Special Economic Zone (Cayman Enterprise City) to aviaition, is seeing an uptick of business aviation traffic, Cayman officials said Monday. In recent years, the Civil Aviation Authority of the Cayman Islands (CAACI, Booth C11022) has had considerably success in building up its aircraft registry (it uses the VP-C registration mark), with operators around the world.

Richard Smith, Cayman Islands director general of civil aviation, said of the registry, “Currently we have 240 aircraft, of which 190 are private or business owned. The rest are commercially operated within the Cayman Islands and the Middle East.” He stressed the close working relationship CAACI has with the FAA.

Meanwhile, Caston Powery, operations manager at the main international airport’s IslandAir FBO, said business aviation visitor numbers have been picking up in recent years. He said the island also had an airline, Cayman Airways, that connects the three islands—Grand Cayman, Cayman Brac and Little Cayman. It also flies to five destinations in the U.S.—Miami, Tampa, New York, Dallas and Chicago—as well as Cuba, Jamaica and Honduras.

Charlie Kirkconnell, CEO of Cayman Enterprise City–situated just north of Grand Cayman’s International Airport, said that there is another international airport in the islands, on Cayman Brac, where he is proposing to develop a drone testing facility.