Malaysia Aviation Group Committed to Ensuring Operational Stability
The Voice of Chandigarh :
Malaysia Aviation Group (MAG) is fully committed to ensuring safe and reliable operations and remains steadfast in focusing our efforts towards stabilising our operations. Ahead of CAAM’s latest directive, MAG had taken proactive steps to reduce capacity with the objective of ensuring safe and reliable operations.
While it is a difficult decision, our focus is to prioritise customers first, ensuring we can deliver credible flight schedules and ensure the best possible customer experience moving forward. The reduced network involves 20% of our capacity, comprising Malaysia Airlines, Firefly and Amal’s routes in Domestic Malaysia, ASEAN, North Asia, Australia, New Zealand, Greater China, South Asia and the Middle East.
As air travel returned to normalcy with airlines globally restoring capacity into the market, we had been managing our schedules proactively to mitigate post-pandemic challenges including supply chain disruptions. We made the decision to carefully restore our capacity taking into consideration the speed of supply chain support.
This is also contributed by global shortages due to a lack of resources that are causing delays in the production of spare parts by aircraft and parts manufacturers (OEMs). This has led to longer turnaround times for engine overhauls and repairs, including for the MAG fleet, which relies on external partners for these services, resulting in lack of engines for our operations. Despite these challenges, MAG has maintained the quality of its maintenance work, managing both internally and externally, even with the associated high costs and financial impacts.
At the same time, we are working closely with our stakeholders, including regulators and OEMs, to effectively address operational challenges and ensure timely and reliable delivery of spare parts – encompassing adequate and high-quality spares and a robust aircraft maintenance programme.
Additionally, the global shortage of parts has affected the on-time delivery of our new aircraft orders, which, in turn, has impacted our fleet planning. By 2024, MAG was scheduled to receive 17 new aircraft orders as part of our fleet modernisation programme and support our growth requirements. However, to date, MAG has only received four (4) Boeing 737-8 aircraft out of the 13 contractually agreed by 2024. For the A330neo, MAG was scheduled to receive four (4) aircraft but is now expected to receive three (3) by the end of the year as committed by Airbus.
MAG has experienced attrition of skilled workforce as new MRO players, both local and international, have entered the Malaysian market. To address this, we are collaborating with partners to augment our manpower and increase our skilled engineering workforce and we have improved remuneration packages to sustain a strong talent pipeline for MAG.
We apologise and understand the frustration this has brought to our customers, and wish to assure that our team is working diligently to provide affected customers with compensation options available which include flight reallocations, and full refunds without any penalty charges. Due to the increased traffic we are experiencing at our Global Contact Centre, we encourage passengers to use the ‘My Booking’ feature on our website for quicker service and to check the status of their flights.
I wish to reiterate that these steps, while difficult, are necessary to ensure safe and reliable operations moving forward. We thank our customers and seek their understanding and patience while we resolve the above issues. We look forward to serving you better.
