Singapore Airlines (SIA) is seeking to hire around 2,000 cabin crew members as air travel continues to pick up pace.
More than 800 cabin crew members have already been hired since hiring started in March. Amongst these new hires, three out of five are former crew members who had left the job.
SIA chief executive Goh Choon Phong said in an interview: “We have been proactive, we anticipated that things are opening up and that we want to be ahead of the curve.”
“As many of the new cabin crew members had formerly worked at SIA Group, this reduces the amount of time needed to train them” – he added.
In September 2020, the SIA Group, including Scoot, had in September 2020 reduced around 4,300 positions across its airlines. The group had to lay off fewer than 2,000 employees.
Goh said that none of the crews or planes are fully utilised yet as air travel is still recovering from the pandemic.
“But we are deploying them so that they can all be operationally ready, and whenever we want to introduce increased frequencies or new points, we can easily step it up because the resources are already there and trained,” he said.
The planes and crew members were deployed on a regular basis so that they can be operationally ready.
In addition, SIA predicts that its passenger capacity would hit 61 per cent of pre-pandemic levels for the first quarter of the 2022/2023 financial year and 67 per cent by the second quarter.
The group also expects to handle over 70 per cent of its pre-Covid-19 destinations by the end of the second quarter.
