SIA recruiting 2,000 cabin crew as air travel picks up

Singapore Airlines (SIA) is looking to recruit about 2,000 cabin crew as air travel continues to pick up pace.

More than 800 cabin crew members have already been hired since hiring started in March. About three in five of these were former crew members who had left the job.

The remaining new crew members are set to be hired by the end of its current financial year next March, SIA said.

SIA chief executive Goh Choon Phong told The Sunday Times: "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.

SIA did not elaborate on the number of flight crew it currently employs, citing commercial sensitivities.

The group, which also includes budget carrier Scoot, had in September 2020 cut around 4,300 positions across its airlines. After taking into account a recruitment freeze, natural attrition and the take-up of voluntary departure schemes, the number of staff who had to leave was fewer than 2,000.

Prior to the retrenchment exercise, the SIA Group had about 3,200 pilots and almost 11,000 cabin crew.

Mr Goh said the number of pilots at SIA Group is still similar to pre-Covid-19 numbers, with just "a very small number" who have left.

Almost all of SIA's existing pilots, cabin crew and aircraft are now flying regularly again. But the airline said it is unable to disclose the exact number, citing commercial sensitivity.

Mr Goh said that none of the flight crew or planes is fully utilised yet, given that 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.

Mr Goh also said SIA does not need its crew levels to be restored fully to what it was before the pandemic yet.

This is so given that its passenger capacity is expected to hit 61 per cent of pre-Covid-19 levels in this quarter and 67 per cent during the following three months.

"There are some markets that may be closed for a while," he said. "China is one possible one, we don't know when it will be open so we don't need to be back at 100 per cent just yet."

Although there is currently enough flight crew to handle upcoming flights, he conceded that SIA's customer service centre had struggled with the spike in inquiries.

He said customers had been concerned about the rapid changes in border restrictions and test requirements, among other issues. Many had thus called the airline to validate the information and receive some form of assurance.

The number of staff manning the carrier's call centre by April had already slightly exceeded the number prior to the pandemic, said Mr Goh.

But call volumes had spiked to 160 per cent of Covid-19 levels on some days, following Singapore's announcement that it will open up to all travellers vaccinated against Covid-19.

Mr Goh said the issues in customer service are now "rapidly being resolved" and the situation at the call centre is normalising.

"While we did what we did with the other manpower resources, which is to plan and put in place capacity ahead of demand, in this case, the surge was just so high that we were unable to actually match (it) completely," said Mr Goh.

"We do apologise to our customers who were affected by all these issues."