Romulus:
So all those 10 year old aircraft owned by SIA and serviced by SIAEC, they're clearly falling out of the sky. All over the place I assume. It that the case and there is a global media conspiracy to cover up the losses?
Or is it that, just maybe, SIAEC keep the SIA aircraft flying reliably and safely. Just the same as QANTAS
Sorry, but you are misinformed, and sorry I didn't get back sooner, my partner is in Peter Mac and I am somewhat preoccupied.
The trouble, Romulus, is that you need to take account of maintenance philosophy which is something the Government, Economists and the General public do not understand.
Of course SIA aircraft don't "fall out of the sky" but that doesnt necessarily mean they are well or badly maintained.
By way of example, the Boeing maintenance schedules used to be predicated on the expected life in service of an aircraft operated by an American carrier in an American maintenance environment and an American weather environment, but more importantly, an American tax and depreciation environment.
The above "environments" used to mean that carriers would replace their aircraft every ten years, hence their maintenance philosophy was to do exactly what was necessary to achieve that working life and not a dollar more. We used to call this "buy it and fly it" the aircraft got SFA structural work on it
Take engine maintenance for example, when you have spare engines and/or modules scattered all over America together with people qualified to change them, you can operate to a much relaxed standard compared to a smaller and geographically isolated operator like Qantas, which is why Qantas develped its much vaunted RB211 maintenance prowess.
Now compare that to the Australian "environment" - the tax and depreciation laws here used to mean that the aircraft have to be kept for Twenty to Thirty years - so the structural task and maintenance philosophy has to be very different by definition, in that you have to get on top of and fix incipient problems that American carriers don't, which is why you end up with professional engineers devising work schemes not contemplated by Boeing.
Then of course there is the issue of the definitions of "maintenance". "repair", "overhaul" and "upgrade". Say you have a problem - a crack in the pilots opening window assembly..
You go to the applicable manuals and you find that there is:
(a) An immediate repair scheme with a specified high frequency of inspection to ensure that the repair holds.
(b) A modification scheme for the original assembly that should fix the problem for a specified life with a relaxed inspection period.
(c) A series of replacement parts that Boeing believes will fix the problem permanenetly with no further inspection required.
(d) A totally new assembly that avoids the matter entirely.
(e) and when (d) doesn't work, some fixes (a,b,c) for the totally new assembly.
(f) ..and finaly another new assembly to replace (d)
rinse and repeat..
So there you have it mate, to "maintain" this aircraft you can do a,b,c or d. Which one do you choose? That depends on your company maintenance philosophy.
Now multiply just this one assembly by Ten years of factory production cost saving modifications, aircraft variants, in service failures and you get Fifteen effing pages of combinations of replacement parts and repair schemes, of the type that frequently got handed to me to sort out. Then multiply that by thousands of assemblies.
So no, you cannot say "SIA is cheaper than Qantas maintenance and just as good" unless you know in excruciating detail just what it is that both maintenance organisations are trying to achieve, and the forensic maintenance management planning ability to do this in Australia is now minimal.
This is why overseas maintenance scares the crap out of me as well as the ALAEA, we know that what they do overseas will mostly "comply", but we don't know for how long or what other problems may be introduced, especially if there is an Australian Manager who is tempted to cut corners to save money, leaving bigger problems to her successor.
The Australian depreciation and tax rules when I was at Ansett required that we "gold plate" the aircraft because it cost us nothing to uprgrade rather than repair various items, to the point where a certain media proprietor and a former truck driver sold some "written off", "very old" DC9 aircraft to Evergreen for a peppercorn sum and pocketed some very serious money, since the "old" aircraft were actually very close to latest production equipment status.