Refurbished MASwings ATRs to be Ready by the End of the Year

4th Sep 2017

MASwings Chief Executive Officer Aminuddin Zakaria revealed in a recent interview that the customers of this airline can expect to fly in newly refurbished ATR aircrafts before the end of this year. According to him, cabin refurbishments on ten ATR planes should be completed by November, when the regional carrier is planning to unveil a mock-up of the redesigned interior for the media.

MASwings CEO said:

After that we will wait to get the proposed cabin refurbishment approved which will not take long, and then it will take about a month for our entire ATR fleet to undergo and finish the process.

He also answered the suggestion made by the State Tourism, Culture and Environment Minister Masidi Manjun, who said that MASwings needs to have more planes that it can use in case of technical issues and in order to decrease the number of cancellations and delays.

Responding to this, Mr. Aminuddin said:

I believe MAS and MoT have been conducting meetings to revise the RAS agreement (which expires this year-end), whether some of the route frequencies needs to be increase or decrease based on current developments such as better road network, as it has not been reviewed for 10 years (since MASwings inception). They will likely to call us for feedback later but for me, the fleet improvement will be based whether Sabah and Sarawak continues to be our focus or if they plan to expand beyond the eastern States, which means they might consider other aircrafts besides ATRs to service regional international destinations.

Also, the regional carrier should move its system to Amadeus Plus by mid-2018. This will allow it to differentiate between Malaysians and non-Malaysians, allowing only the first to take advantage of subsidies rates for RAS (rural air services) in East Malaysia.

According to Mr. Aminuddin, although the airline serves less than 5% of foreign tourists in average on its flights, they expect this number to grow in the next few years, making such a system a necessity.

He said:

At present we have already migrated to the new reservation system using Amadeus in Phase 1 back in June, along with mother company Malaysia Airlines (MAS). For now we can only differentiate those who purchase from overseas through IBE (internet booking engine) system online, but we target we can differentiate internally from this country (meaning foreigners who bought tickets within Malaysia) too once we move to Amadeus Plus middle of next year.