After a leisurely breakfast and repacking, I walked to the bus outside the Mydin store to catch the bus direct to KLIA and LCCT. I got to the airport just as check-in opened and dropped my bag and went to the lounge for a couple of hours of eating, drinking and doing errands like paying bills and filing them into Google Documents.
I proceeded to the gate some 40 minutes before departure and was shocked to see my flight boarding as AirAsia does 25 minute turnarounds normally and the plane wouldn’t normally be here. They must build some slack in the schedule sometimes for whatever reason.
During boarding I noticed that one of the cabin crew had an Indonesian rather than Malaysian flag on the name tag. Then it appeared all of them had the same. The PAs for the fight were made in Malay and English, both with normal Malaysian Malay intonations without a hint of Indonesian accent. Strange!
I then noticed that the supposed Indonesian flag had stars and a crescent, making it in fact the Singapore flag. I asked one of the crew who advised that they were Singaporean; hence indistinguishable from Malaysians in speech. They are part of a small group recruited from and based in the republic.
During the flight, the Captain’s announcements were in English only (without being followed by Malay). I checked and found out that the pilots are Singaporean too. It’s all starting to make sense. Like the pilot, the cabin crew aren’t required to have knowledge of the Malay language also. Which explains why the safety demo was a little less coordinated … for this route the audio was played in Malay rather than English and some of them didn’t know the language to pick up the audio cues precisely for when to pull the inflation tag, hold up the whistle or the light.
It just seems so strange that AirAsia, a cost-leader, would employ staff in a base where the salaries may be 2.5x higher (or more). I suppose it saves on overnight accommodation for the first and last flight of the day if they had used KL-based crew.
But more likely, AirAsia has aspirations for a Singapore subsidiary, and having crew this way means they can start up ASAP with trained staff should they ever get a Singaporean Air Operator’s Certificate. Right now, the Singaporean crew are flying Malaysian-registered aircraft.
Well, AirAsia Singapore … I wish you well and hope that you will soon paint the skies over the “little red dot” red too! For the unfamiliar, “little red dot” is a term used by Singapore’s neighbours to describe the city-state, much to their offence. The Singapore-based crew do only two trip-patterns:
Early: SIN-KUL-SBW-KUL-SIN.
Late: SIN-KUL-TWU-KUL-SIN.
While the former is a full day, the latter is a very long day for shorthaul crew because they typically work a full week (unlike longhaul crew who may only work twice a week).
For taking notice of their nationality and interest in their work, the Senior Flight Attendant offered me a free bottle of water. I take it was from their crew allocation as it wasn’t the same brand that was being sold from the bar!
On the flight, I had also chatted up Ryan (young Queenslander miner) and we shared the taxi to Semporna which cost RM95, taking an hour. By chance, we were also staying at the same hotel and will be doing some dives together. We grabbed a quick dinner before retiring.