MAS and AirAsia Can Work Together
By: John Teo


The less-than satisfactory exercise to “rationalise” air services within the country has returned to haunt us.

The government first gave AirAsia its approval to ply the Kota Kinabalu-Sibu route, only to withdraw it upon representation by MASWings, the affiliate of the national carrier created to serve the unprofitable rural routes in Sabah and Sarawak. The route will henceforth be taken off some time in October.

MASWings appears able to produce paperwork showing it has the route exclusively to itself, as part of the deal with the government to take on unwanted rural air services.

Although the rural air services are subsidised by the government, MASWings claims that subsidies are only partial and that it, therefore, needs profitable routes, such as Kota Kinabalu-Sibu, to cross-subsidise its other routes.

All very well, except that air passengers in Sibu feel shortchanged and are making their unhappiness felt, to the particular discomfort of Sibu member of parliament and Deputy Transport Minister Datuk Robert Lau.

Why shouldn’t they? AirAsia’s Airbus 320s provide superior speed and comfort at more attractive fares than MASWings’ 70-seater planes. It is small wonder Sibu passengers started deserting MASWings after AirAsia started its route from there to Kota Kinabalu. Hence, the complaint to the government by MasWings.

The ugly catfights between Malaysia Airlines (MAS) and AirAsia that we thought were history are revived, with Mas employees’ unions pitching in, blaming AirAsia for the redundancies and retrenchments they’ve had to endure, among other things.

By the looks of things, MAS and MasWings are looking back wistfully to the days of old when they had a monopoly of flights all across the nation. They charged exorbitant fares and yet lost money. Their resentment of AirAsia is understandable, but their arguments against what they see as a competitor will not wash.

AirAsia did not cause a race to the bottom, as MAS would have us believe. The low-cost carrier did not so much steal passengers from the national carrier as create plenty of new passengers. I have relatives living and working in various parts of the country, for example, who now regularly commute back to Kuching over long weekends. That would have been unthinkable back in the days when the only option was to travel on MAS.

AirAsia would most probably be unsustainable had it relied only on poaching passengers who used to fly MAS. Cheap air travel has to be one of the greatest contributors to pulling our far-flung country closer together.

The more plausible problem for Mas is that it has been caught on the back foot by AirAsia and is still struggling to get a grip on what sort of airline it should now be. That need not necessarily reflect negatively upon MAS.

AirAsia, after all, is a phenomenally successful low-cost carrier pioneer in all of Asia and unfortunately for MAS, both share the same home base. Going forward, where Malaysia goes in aviation, the rest of Asia is likely to follow.

It may well be that the future of air travel around the world post-Great Recession is low-cost airlines. We should hope not. If nothing else, we do not want to exchange a MAS monopoly for one by AirAsia.

AirAsia does need to be held in check. We all have come to accept it is a budget carrier by putting up with the occasional delays and other in conveniences. We would not think of risking any important appointment, for example, by opting for AirAsia and expecting it to unfailingly fly at the appointed time.

Yet, I have a sneaking suspicion that the airline is starting to take too cavalier an attitude towards its passengers’ growing acceptance of its shortcomings. It needs to be very careful that it does not jeopardize its leadership position in the low-cost segment by taking its customers’ goodwill too much for granted.

How to ensure that MAS remains a sustainable full-service option for domestic air travellers? Now, that is a really tough question. I do not for one moment envy MAS’ management for having to grapple with that problem. It probably needs to downsize even further, to become a much more nimble, truly niche airline that goes for the high yields of passengers willing to pay full fares for hassle-free comfort, reliable services and interline connectivity to destinations beyond Malaysia.

Now that we have become the regional aviation leader, we also need a competent government agency to oversee the industry’s healthy growth and development. We need to sustain that leadership position in the lead-up to full open-skies liberalisation in the region.

The “rationalisation” exercise clearly still needs tidying up. It seems plain that what are truly rural air services need to be fully recognised as such and full government subsidies extended to MASWings so that MAS is freed to compete with- and/or complement – AirAsia, as the travelling public clearly wants them to.


Source: New Straits Times, Friday, August 21, 2009.
Why Blog? The Purpose of Blogging

I, like many others, have been thinking the state of the current air travel system. With all the security checks and check-ins, the travel time becomes long. And easily using car, train or bus wins the passenger plane in the spent time for traveling from place A to B.

In other words, if you fly from Helsinki to Tampere, you can expect the check-in etc. to take at least 1.5 hours prior to the flight and then the flight takes maybe 0.5 hours. It might be also late, cancelled etc., and if this is a connecting flight, you may need to wait for your flight for another 5 hours sitting at the airport. On the other side you are waiting for your luggage to come, and it may take easily 0.5 hours.

So the shortest time with check-in luggage to travel from Helsinki to Tampere is maybe 1.5+0.5+0.5 hours = 2.5 hours. You may have also spent 60-70 euros for taxi from home to the airport, and on the other side the same amount of money to taxi. This makes moving from Helsinki to Tampere to be 180/2.5 = 72 km/h.

What about if this was a connecting flight that you waited for 5 hours and which was one hour late. That makes 5+1+0.5+0.5 = 7 hours. This makes the speed 180/7.0 = 25 km/h. You could beat the plane with a bicycle!

How about if you used a light aircraft to fly by yourself:
- Getting to the airport takes the same time, although it is easier to get to the Malmi airport than to Helsinki-Vantaa with public transportation without paying the large Taxi fee.
- Doing pre-flight check for the plane takes 0.5 hours. If you are quick, you have filed flight plan etc. during this time too. You may be able to speed this up if you are not flying alone.
- If the plane flies 222 km/h on average (includes takeoff and landing), taxi tie down etc. time is accounted with +0.5 hours (includes both airports), the total time to fly to Tampere would be: 0.5 + 0.5 + 180/222.0 = 1.81 hours. This is 99 km/h.

So the slow light general aviation plane is faster than the airliner on this trip. It doesn't win use of car though, getting to the airport and from the another airport takes time. But it wins train, because in case of train, you would have to get to the train station, and get from the train station to your destination with public transportation, which adds easily 0.5 hours on both ends, even Pendolino is therefore slower than the private car on this distance, so it is not better than using the personal aircraft.

How about if the light plane was a bit faster. It would travel 300 km/h. The travel time would become 1.6 hours. This is 112.5 km/h. Actually you can save fuel on Toyota Prius if you travel 112.5 km/h. And you are sooner directly at your destination. Not bad though for the plane. Wins the airliner hands down even in the best case.

If the distance was a bit longer, it would change the other way. The private plane would be a lot faster way to travel than car. And the airline would still have the overhead associated with security checks, package check-ins, package claims etc. For example, already if you would be going to Kuopio or Jyväskylä, the personal aircraft would be faster than the private car. And still the airliner would be the loser in the speed.

If you would go to e.g. Tallinn, Estonia, then the private plane would be excellent choice. That is because you can't go there by car, you have to use some transportation in between (e.g. boat). Even fastest boats are slow compared to even small ultralight aircraft. You could take the airliner, but it would take very long to get to the destination because of the overhead taking place at the airport. Instead if you took off with private plane, the overhead can be made smaller.

This of course requires that the plane could be flown in all weather and it would be simple to operate, with no need to do complicated tasks prior to flight in the pre-flight check. Something that would be for personal travel like a family car rather than for "flying sport". And the plane should be very low drag and very high efficiency design to make it compete in the fuel burn with the car (competing with e.g. Toyota Prius with a plane is very tough - the fuel budget for 100 km would be about 5 liters to be equal). Many current aircraft are not like that. But I feel that there would be use for that kind of planes, and this would not be impossible.

Here is by the way a video I recorded last May in the California trip. This video is about flight from Mojave Space Port to Palo Alto.


Cirrus SR20 flight from Mojave to Palo Alto (raw footage) from Karoliina Salminen on Vimeo.