Page 8 - AAA January / February 2024 Digital Magazine | GBP

SIA A380 Business Class

thinking about what the recovery course, we offered other incen- Goh, a 33-year veteran at
would look like. Our capacity tives and credits if they wished Singapore Airlines, said the
went down to about 3% in April to keep it as a credit, they would airline did a range of things to
2020 and we were carrying less have some enhancement in the reduce the need for layoffs such
than half a percent of the pas- value. as arranging alternative employ-
senger we used to carry. ment, allowing some of them to

“So we had three priorities. The The final and critical aspect was work part-time and supplement-
ing their income with alternative
first priority was liquidity. How do about how to preserve the air- employment.
we boost our liquidity? And for line’s operating capabilities Goh
that we were fortunate to have said. The airline also communicated
a very supportive shareholders, with its staff the need to be first
Temasek in particular, but also “ with chocks away and therefore
the other shareholders. We what needed to do in order to
raised in total S$23.5 billion. So make sure that it was operation-
that was fortunate because our We know that our ally ready to launch into the new
shareholders believed in us and people are the most post COVID world.
we’re able to support us and we important asset that “While there was not much in
have since been able to reward flying activities, we continued
them. we have. to upskill, re-skill our staff, we
continued to keep the operating
“The second priority at the time, crew or pilots as well as cabin
was our customers, the care of Without pilots, without cabin crew active. There may not be
our customers. And we felt as we crew, without planners, without a lot of flying as a whole, but
always have that we have to do schedulers, you cannot operate we rotated them so that most of
things the right way by our cus- in air. You cannot operate flights. them were able to still keep their
tomers. So, at the outset we told So, while we had to take some currency.
our customers that we will honor painful staff measures, we told
any refund that they wanted. For our staff that any layoffs will be “We continue to rotate aircraft
us it was the right thing to do. Of the last resort.” and while utilization was much

8 | JANUARY - FEBRUARY 2024 WWW.GBP.COM.SG/AAA