Originally Posted by
KACommuter
There is a major difference in degree.
MH managed to go bust, which is an existential crisis. That's usually an opportunity to clean house, learn lessons and implement changes to the way work is done. The fact that there is still such amateurishness suggests that opportunity has not been fully utilised in spite of the recent harsh experience.
CX's mistakes to date are not existential and they are nowhere near going bust. If this happened on CX everyone would be incredulous and the comments would be "someone should be fired". And there's a real likelihood that would actually happen (though we wouldn't be told).
Would that happen at MH? One wonders.
The problem with MH, past, present and probably future, is that the government, as much as Malaysians care to deny, has too much of a say on the running of the airline, from who run's the airline/hiring of CEO's and top management to the nitty gritty of where the airline flies to and frequency.
No doubt, the airline wasted a hell of a lot of money over the past 20 years or so under 2-3 different management teams with some certainly in a business they had absolutely no idea about running (the mobile phone company and owner) to the politically appointed CEO's (Idris Jala and the subsequent CEO who was hired there after from the power company who also had to oversee the tragedies of 2 aircraft lost).
Much of it has been down to poor decision making, political influence, and a business model that was designed to fail under each and every management team that took over.
This is probably the first time in a while, MH are under the management of proper CEO's who have vast experince in the airline industry unlike before.
They appear to have stopped the bleeding and are still trying to rectify a lot of issues that still are a problem even today.
They do need time as some of these issues and things will take a bit of time to solve/sort out in my humble opinion.
MH is by no means a bad airline. They do have good crews, good pilots, good engineers and a reasonably young fleet but they do need to get back to the consistent standards of service they had 5-6 years ago without going back into the red.
They do have some very good opportunities now to build on the growth of the China, India, Australia and south each asian markets and to make in-roads into these countries and to ignore Europe and the America's for now and to save those routes for another time.
Malaysia is dependent now on the China, Korea and Taiwan tourist markets more so than it has ever been. And it simply must expand into these markets and to look after these routes and to improve on inflight services (consistent cabin crew standards/onboard WIFI/better entertainment selections/better standards of meals)>