MAB COO Confident of Fixing the Company with the Current Strategy

3rd May 2016

If you ask the current COO of Malaysia Airlines, what it would take for the airline to be fixed, he’ll tell you loud and clear that the current strategy is more than enough.

Bellew, who has been with the company for about eight months now, did say MAB needs to grow sales:

We need to improve our sales, that is part of what we are doing right now and things are improving quite rapidly. A lot of operational things are coming together quite well, on-time performance and we are getting much better at delivering bags on time.

He continued:

Our aircrafts are going through massive process of refurbishment; we are also doing a complete overhaul of the Airbus A330, that’s what we are doing right now.

Malaysia Airlines Partners with Aircraft Propeller Service from US

Meanwhile, MAB is expanding its long list of partners, this time with the US-based Aircraft Propeller Service LLC (APS) to open an ATR turboprop propeller repair and overhaul facility at KLIA.

This is will be the first facility of this kind in the Asia-Pacific and is expected to start working in August, according to MAB COO Bellew.

These facilities, Bellew said, are currently only available in North America, South America and Europe, so this would actually improve the turnaround of the airlines.

The facility will be housed within Malaysia Airlines’ Centre of Excellence at Kuala Lumpur International Airport and will serve airlines using ATR planes. According to Bellew, MAB has already allocated RM16 million in capital expenditure for spare parts used for the maintaining ATR planes.

He said:

Another RM4 million to RM8 million in capex will be used for the upgrade of aircraft hangars in Sabah and Sarawak in the next two years.

ATR president for Eastern Support Luigi Celmi said KL is its largest spare parts pool when it comes to Asia-Pacific:

There are 370 ATRs operating in Asia-Pacific today and the spare parts pool here is supporting nearly a third of the fleet in the region. Airlines from Indonesia, Thailand and Myanmar have been sending their aircraft to Malaysia to undergo scheduled heavy maintenance checks.