This is just the last section of the Singapore Airlines Financial Results Briefing held at the SIA training centre on the 10th of May which might be of interest to many here. Here goes:
Ms. Kyung-Hee Park, Bloomberg: Hi, Kyung-Hee Park from Bloomberg. You earlier announced that you would be giving unpaid leave for some of your junior cadets. Cathay yesterday came out and said they’re going to do unpaid leave for their cabin crew. Are there any similar plans SIA is looking at right now? Thank you.
Mr. Ng Chin Hwee: I think the circumstances of Cathay and ours are quite different obviously. The voluntary no pay leave that we have undertook for our first officers, as you explained earlier, was actually an outcome of the excess that came about from the global financial crisis, and obviously the - this year, rather the year just past wasn’t a very strong one, so we couldn’t grow as high as we had planned. It doesn’t mean that there will be no plans to increase capacity going forward. So as a result there is a temporary excess of first officers for a time being. This should not be seen really as a retrenchment exercise of any sort. First of all it’s voluntary. Secondly it’s only for a brief period of time and indeed going forward we may have to continue to recruit more potential cadet pilots to plan for the operating
plans three years ahead. That’s the kind of lead time we are talking about. So to put the record straight, there’s no plans at all to do at this point in time, to have any form of no pay leave for the cabin crew, nor for the captains of the cockpit crew.
Mr Ng Chin Hwee is the vice president for HR and operations at Singapore Airlines incase anyone is curious who he is.