Thursday, August 24, 2006

WHOSE FAULT, FLIGHT DELAY?

NO DELAY on the part of AirAsia deputy group CEO Kamarudin Meranun in passing the buck.

"Our A320 aircraft is very reliable and we're doing our part, but Malaysia Airports Bhd is no reacting fast enough to address the issues," he said (TheSTAR, today, "Don't give excuses, airlines told").

Tourism Minister Tengku Adnan Mansor, however, said flight delays were more prevalent among flights operated by AirAsia.

"We have checked with Malaysia Airports Bhd and it is not their problem. The airlines will have to look at their schedules and find the root cause of the problem," the minister said (TheSTAR, today, "Delays last up to five hours").

Flight delays aren't a new thing in the business. Back in the late 80s, frequent delays landed Malaysia Airlines' bosses in the soup and paved the way for corporate men like Tajudin Ramli to take over the running of airline management from civil servants like Tan Sri Aziz Abdul Rahman.

Then, MAS officials revealed that quite a few of those delays were caused by VVIP passengers, including ministers, who thought it was fashionable to be late. They also blamed the Press for being sensational.

So , passing the buck, Kamarudin Meranun, is nothing new in the business, either. When under siege, blame others!

11 comments:

  1. Saya harap kamaruddin janganlah nak melanun rakyat dengan alasan2 bodoh.

    Berapa peratus dari schedule dalamnegeri AirAsia yang menepati masa? jawapan ini harus dijawab oleh MAB bukan AirAsia.

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  2. Anonymous2:26 am

    ada persamaan, air asia dan khairy jamaluddin. kedua2nya baru setahun jagung tapi bergembar-gembur dan digembar-gembur. tinggi dilambung jatuh terhunam. this is the result of an ascension that does not heed the rule of reason. nepotism & cronyism tak bawa kemajuan yang berpanjangan. mas banyak cacat celanya, tapi sekurang-kurangnya ia sudah makan asam garam. lihat pegawainya encik arasu langsung tak tuding jejari telunjuk dan menjuih bibir. beliau profesional sekali walaupun hanya berpangkat rendahan. yang deputy ceo sorang ni melompat macam kena belacan dan teruuuih tuduh orang lain yang buat girlfriend dia mengandung. apa lah.

    elok kementerian chan kong choy selidik apa sebab sampai ada yang 5 jam lewat. adakah 1/ air asia kurang pesawat 2/ air asia tak cekap 3/ air asia manja sangat 4/ lct tak canggih 5/ vvip lambat 6/ semua di atas.

    jangan main tuduh. tu anak saya yang 6 tahun tu pun selalu salahkan kakak dia ...

    dah lah tu, tuduh orang lain!

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  3. My daughter (14 year-old) frequently takes MAS flight out of KB to KLIA on Thursday (last flight) and most of the time the flight is always late or delayed by atleast 30 minutes. The normal cause is due to AirAsia's flight was delayed. KB airport only has one runway.

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  4. Anonymous9:34 am

    Sdr Rocky,

    It may be useful to took at this issue from a larger perspective than mere operational glitches.

    Maybe you want to retrace it from the time the decision was made to allow a second airline to compete with Mas.

    The business models may differ, but they are operating in the same general market.

    Here, we must consider Mas as the "preferred" airline -- the anak emas, if you wish. Despite the repeated warning that it must fend for itself, Mas contuinues to receive massive handouts of taxpayers' money.

    Even to retrench staff via the VSS, it had to depend on taxpayers money. Then, to compete with a truly commercial airline, AirAsia, it launched its version of low fare operations and soon after raised it fares by as much as 30 per cent.

    Even the outcome of unbundling exercise conducted by Bina Fikir Consultancy is questionable.
    Has it worked?

    Now we are approaching another Visit Malaysia Year. Tengku Adnan has every reason to be worried.

    There's no need for me to remind you of the fiasco created by the Government-owned Mas during the first VMY in the early 1990's, when they flying what was dubbed "the flying coffins" and flight delays were a rule rather than exception.

    Now Mas is back in Government's hand again and a massive amount of public fund has been employed to bail it out.

    I am not against a bail-out of Mas, but I feel that we must thoroughly monitor its progress. No point writing glowing reports about its new management, if none of the fundamental problems are solved.

    As for AirAsia, it is a commercial airline. The rule of the game is simple. If it does not keep its service standard, the customers will abandon it and over time it will suffer. Many such airlines around the world had closed shop.

    Surely we don't want that to happen to AirAsia. It has so far been a success story. Let's hope that the good story is kept that way. In this rather depressing time, we can do with one or two success stories.

    Thank You.

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  5. Anonymous11:29 am

    Minister, Chan should first of all examine whether his ministry is being governed according to international standards! If he and his management team can't even solve the simple taxi problems confronting the public, he should just keep his big mouth shut and try not to score brownie points by uttering garbage in public!

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  6. Anonymous12:16 pm

    rockybru/datuk akadirjasin, while airasia is a commercial entity as datuk described it, it has not been acting quite as such in its relations with government regulators and other agencies, including mas and mab.

    through skillful pr and manipulation, not to mention the right friends in the abdullah administration's kitchen, tony f has succeeded in making the ministry and the cabinet dance to his tunes. i admire the guy and he is doing what a shrewd businessman would do in this land of cronyism and nepotism .. but those men do favours for tony f at the expense of others, including mas and mab, and taxpayers like datuk, bru, and i.

    mas has gone through too many hands too many times in too short a time. i blame the bina fikir boys and their master for much of the problems that the national airline faces today. these people will be brought to book when abdullah steps down, not before, of course.

    minister chan should set up a committee of all involved to resolve the problem. there should be an efficient system where you penalise the responsible party/parties for every delay. money collected can be used to invest in facilities at the airport which will make waiting out delayed flights a more pleasant experience in future.

    wasalam.

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  7. YBhg Dato AKJ, Rocky, and other readers

    Ever since the term "Unbundling" came into picture, I was trying to figure out is there anything this new supposedly genius finance player brought to financial industry.

    Then I realised that it is nothing more than the ole and age old idea of "sell and lease back" to generate cashflow. Since then, I've been wary of new ideas and ideology introduced by this new young brandedly certified professionals. They are just mere news spinners.

    On MAS and AirAsia, talking about the weakness of MAS from the perspective of financial performance only covers one aspect.

    Having AirAsia around with the hope that competition will see a more energized and competitive MAS does not help either. But I am afraid to support this argument further, since we will end up into a trap to see MAS be merged and another ECM Libra - Avenue in the making.

    I love to go back to basic of runnign a Company. Having put all the vision & mission, laying down the objectives, strategic options and decisions, implementation plans, and control & monitoring, we should ask:

    1. Are all these strategic issues dealt with properly? Key characteristic of good strategic planning is that it is realistic. Is it so?

    2. Do the organisational leader have the capacity and authority to act accordingly? Can they decide free of interference according to the objective laid out.

    From the inside experiances within MAS, the prevalent view is that morale has been hampered for decades and a culture of looting and "taking care of own ass" prevail at the middle management upward. This would raise my subsequent issue:

    3. How do you institutionalise morality into an organisation?

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  8. Anonymous4:32 pm

    Bru, let's look at personalities.
    As mab-uk said: "through skillful pr and manipulation, not to mention the right friends in the abdullah administration's kitchen (cabinet), tony f has succeeded in making the ministry and the cabinet dance to his tunes. i admire the guy and he is doing what a shrewd businessman would do in this land of cronyism and nepotism .. but those men do favours for tony f at the expense of others, including mas and mab, and taxpayers like datuk, bru, and i."
    But does Mas fare better? I Don't think so. If Tony F is a consumate PR man with friends in Abdullah's dapur, who's Irdis Jala? Surely he's also someone with friends in Abdullah's kitchen.
    Otherwise, how could a manager of a small experimental plant operating in the monopolistic petroleum industry, employing a couple of hundred people, be made taiko of one of the largest GLCs in the country.
    What is Mas, that has over 30,000 employees, compared to an obscure MDS (middle distillate synthesis) plant in Bintulu Sarawak?
    I was writing about this experimental technology for BT long before Jala got anywhere in Shell and, today is lucky enough to be a household name.
    I remember how some key people in Petronas were sceptical of the MDS proposal and I wrote a couple of stories to explain the technology.
    So I think, apple for apple the two head honchos of the two airlines are equally matched. They are among the LUCKIEST Malaysians.
    But tell that to those who were caught in the delays!
    Will Tony F and Jala listen to the PM's plea for improvement by their airlines? I doubt because they know PM will buy whatever story they tell him provided they make it complicated enough.
    Already the NST is spinning the escape route for them at the expense of the government, the taxpayers and the travelling public.
    The Tony-Khairy-kali trademark is too obvious. (From ECM Libra official website: AirAsia Berhad
    RM701mn
    Initial Public Offering
    Joint Bookrunner
    Nov 2004).
    How can Kali not use the NST to tell good stories about AirAsia
    and Tony F?

    b

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  9. Anonymous11:53 pm

    As a former MAS ground supervisor, I must say that MAS has a strict rule on flight delay. There is no such thing as after 15 minutes is considered as a delay. Even 1 minute is considered as delay. The off-block or the time when the aircraft is pushed back is recorded as the departure time. To achieve on time departure, the departure staff must ensure that the aircraft door is closed at least 2 mins before the STD
    to allow sufficient time for the engineering staff to push back the aircraft.
    There is no way to hide a delay as the moment the aircraft door is closed, it would send a signal to the aircraft computer systems which in turn send out a message to Flight Operations.
    In the event of a flight delay, the staff concern as well as the station chief must have a very good reason or else they could be called up to HQ and be grilled.
    All MAS flight carries cargo and sometimes for a Boeing 737, baggage plus cargo could come up to 5 tons but still, there is no reason for delay and the turn round time is just 40 mins.

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  10. Anonymous11:26 pm

    Air Asia big on marketing but small on delivery. Ipoh folks that cheered AA is now in the dumps. As of next month AA service to be discontinued there. Same thing happen in Johore, Alor Star, and airports in Sabah and Sarawak,
    Meantime based on AA marketing savvy alone public funds exceeding 100Mill Ringgit is used to build special purpose Low Cost Terminal just to suit AA. Surely this must come with some responsibility but given AA connections why bother.
    Under the rationalisation programme AA is suppose to take over from MAS the loss making routes together with the many lucrative routes with no competition from MAS to make up for the loss. Now AA is being subsidised by the Goverment. What's worse with the subsidy AA contracts these rural routes to another of its subsidiary Fax Airline and am being told it is cheaper to subsidise MAS than AA. Whats happening ?

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  11. Anonymous9:44 am

    Delay,Delay,Delay..

    My flight was delayed twiced on the 7th and 9th of Nov. 4 Hours delay in total. Called the call center no reply. Its rediculous!

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