Just read an interview with Finnair CEO Pekka Vauramo where he states that Finnish cabin crew are being replaced due to safety reasons!

Interviwer: I read that you have outsourced maintenance work and you are talking about outsourcing some of the cabin crew operations. Is that going to give your customers confidence in your standard of service and consistency and that sort of thing?

Vauramo: First of all, we have used quite a lot of either outsourced or hired workforce in our cabin on our Asian flights and this has been primarily because of language and cultural reasons. On many of our Asian flights, the majority of passengers are originating from Asia. We have about half of our cabin crew on our Asian flights already now coming from Asia. We want to extend this in the future and go more towards subcontracting rather than using hired labor.

Interviwer: So it is not only as a cost-cutting scheme, but it is also a customer service-oriented endeavor?

Vauramo: Absolutely customer service, and to a certain degree also, if worse comes to worse, it is a safety issue, as well, because the cabin crew will need to be able to communicate with various languages. We have such a majority on our Japan filght and some of our China flights, the majority of passengers are originating from those countries, it is important that we have those language skills on board the aircraft.

Source Skift

I understand that this is part of his plan of a plan to sack 700 Finnish Cabin Crew. Perhaps he needs to go further and sack all of them as safety should be the airlines number 1 priority.

I think he is making this up as he goes along or is he just confused?

Only slight problem with his 'safety issue' is that the first 3 routes to have all foreign cabin crew (for safety reasons) are Hong Kong, Singapore and Bangkok and guess what, the vast majority of passengers on these flight don't speak the new cabin crew's local language.

Guess he's not sure.

Perhaps it would be safer to sub contract in a CEO from Asia who knows how to run an airline.