More on Rural Air Services

Tony in last saturday's The Star Biz pullout said that they never really wanted the Rural Air Services (RAS) routes, but landed up with them due to the local air route rationalization exercise. He gave some reasons as to why they choose to operate only 7 Fokker airplanes when MAS had handed over 10 to Penerbangan Malaysia Bhd (PMB), but realized later they should have gotten all 10 due to, in their opinion, the age and reliability of the planes. After the damning audit report on the deplorable condition of the airplanes by Fokker Services Pte Ltd, FAX decided to issue a statement to rebut them. Jeff Ooi has a more detailed writeup on this latest turn of events. Regardless, at the end of the day it looks like taxpayers will have to fork out money again to clean up this RAS mess. Let's hope that with MAS taking back the RAS this nonsense will stop, that is if they can run it like how they managed to run MAS into the black again.