Mass air travel at least two years away, Singapore says

The global aviation industry will take at least two years to recover from the coronavirus pandemic and mass travel to return, Singapore’s Transport Minister Ong Ye Kung said, stressing the importance of developing a widely available and effective vaccine to help countries open their borders. “When a vaccine is widely available around the world and people gain confidence to travel again and visit other countries, then we will have aviation back on its feet, almost fully,” Ong said. “How long that will that take, I can’t make a guess, I would say minimally a couple of years.” Singapore has to “find ways to try to revive” the aviation sector, the minister said, adding that the city-state’s testing capacity is now around 30,000 a day and may rise to 40,000 by November and probably further after then. A balance needs to be struck between travel and epidemic control, Ong said. Asked about Singapore Airlines, which posted a record quarterly loss in the three months through June and is reducing its workforce by about 20%, Ong said the carrier faces a “dire situation” because of the pandemic and the fact it has no domestic market to fall back on. Virus-related travel restrictions mean SIA, which raised S$11b largely through a rights issue earlier in the crisis, is flying a tiny fraction of its usual capacity. Traffic figures for August show the carrier’s passenger numbers were down 98.4% from a year earlier. Whether Singapore Airlines needs to raise more funds will largely depend on how successful any revival in travel is, Ong said. “The more we can revive, the more cash they can generate, the less their need for recapitalization.” <br/>