SINGAPORE Airlines : C6L +3.29% (SIA) learned to be agile during the pandemic, cutting down the time taken to decide on new destinations from weeks and months to mere days.

 

SIA chief executive Goh Choon Phong told more than 300 industry stakeholders at the inaugural Changi Aviation Summit on Tuesday (May 17) that the national carrier now moves easily and swiftly to mount new destinations or increase frequencies to capture demand. 

 

He said that the carrier has been readying its operational resources since the start of the pandemic. Today, despite operating at only about 60 per cent of its pre-pandemic capacity, it is, in fact, utilising almost 100 per cent of its operating resources. 

 

The operationally-ready state enables the Singapore mainboard-listed airline to make revisions at &ldquo very short notice&rdquo and to deploy resources where they are needed.

 

Said Goh: &ldquo What used to take us, perhaps, weeks and months to decide when we talked about mounting new destinations or additional frequencies, it now takes us days to actually deploy&hellip Where the borders are open, where the demand is there, we are able to very quickly deploy those resources so that we can meet those demands.&rdquo  

 

Asked about China&rsquo s continued border closures, he replied that SIA stands ready to serve the market. &ldquo China is pretty much closed today, but whenever China is ready and whenever we are allowed operations, you can be sure that we would be there.&rdquo

 

Pre-pandemic, SIA as a group served 29 points in the Greater China area, making it the second biggest non-Chinese carrier in terms of the number of points served in the world&rsquo s most populous country.

 

The agility of the airline appears to be borne out by the airline group&rsquo s latest operating statistics released on Tuesday. The April numbers showed that the group flew about 1.5 million passengers or 12 times the volume in April 2021, with Singapore having significantly relaxed border control requirements last month.

 

Passenger load factor jumped to 72.7 per cent, the highest since the pandemic hit global shores. The improved load factor across all the route regions was achieved in spite of a higher capacity of 57 per cent of pre-pandemic levels. The metric that measures the percentage of available seating capacity filled by paying passengers was only 13.7 per cent in April 2021. 

 

Goh recounted at the summit that the group&rsquo s passenger traffic plunged from 3.4 million people in January 2020 to 11,000 people in April 2020, when the pandemic started to bite. Passenger capacity dived to only 3 per cent and load factor was under 0.5 per cent.

 

&ldquo Our cash burn then was about S$300-400 million per month &mdash devastating. How did we survive? If somebody were to ask me that question, for an airline without any domestic market, completely dependent on international travel and when borders are going to close&hellip I&rsquo d have said then that it is impossible to survive. But we did&hellip The very first thing for survival is really cash.&rdquo

 

Soon after the pandemic, the group managed to raise billions of dollars from shareholders to strengthen its balance sheet.

 

SIA will release its financial results for FY2022 on Wednesday.