A corporate leader with diverse experience, he is harnessing the latest technological advances to spurMalaysia Airports to greater heights as a smart aviation regional hub.
This month, Dato’ Mohd Shukrie Mohd Salleh brims with pride the recent global achievements clinched by several of its airports. KL International Airport (KLIA) and Langkawi International Airport (LIA) emerge tops in Airports Council International (ACI)’s Airport Service Quality (ASQ) survey for the second quarter of 2021 (2Q21) while KLIA and Kuching International Airport (KIA) attain ACI’s Airport Health Accreditation (AHA), testifying to the airport operator’s continuous commitment to ensuring high safety levels.
Applaud KLIA’s achievement from moving up from ninth spot in the first quarter of 2021 for the over 40 million passengers per annum (mppa) category to become the number one airport in ACI’s latest 2Q21 survey, which benchmarks the world’s best airports in terms of facilities and service standards. LIA, which also scored 5.0/5.0 for 2Q21, was ranked third in the first quarter in the 2-5 mppa category.
KLIA’s refreshed and improved ambience of its terminal after its successful commercial reset initiative contributed in no small way to the overall passengers’ satisfaction. We look forward to the soon opening of Langkawi to fully vaccinated tourists once 80% of its population are inoculated. The perfect scores of these two airports can be attributed to several factors which include the newly refurbished washroom facilities and strict implementation of new travel standard operating procedures that focus on safety and security.
On another note, KLIA and KIA are the first two Malaysian airports to receive the AHA. Their safety measures are benchmarked against global standards in accordance with ACI’s Aviation Business Restart and Recovery guidelines and the International recent announcement of allowing those fully Civil Aviation Organisation’s Council Aviation Recovery Task Force recommendations along with the industry’s best practices.
These two airports join Istanbul Sabiha Gokcen International Airport (ISGIA) which had received the accreditation earlier this year. Currently, LIA, Penang International Airport, Kota Kinabalu International Airport and Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport (also popularly referred to as Subang Airport) are undergoing the AHA assessment.
Committed to ensuring not only safety but also world-class passenger experiences, our overall traffic has been improving based on our latest statistics. The July passenger movements from our total network of airports surpassed the three million mark for the first time this year to register 3.3 million total passengers, up 28.1% from July 2020.
Three million of the passenger traffic came from our Turkish asset ISGIA after the easing of border restrictions and curfews from early June. Meanwhile, we expect the marginal increase in passenger movements witnessed at our Malaysian airports in July to improve in the coming months following the government’s recent announcement of allowing those fully vaccinated to travel interstate, subject to several conditions.
Where Malaysian aviation is concerned, our plans are to bring new game-changing air travel offerings soon. Moving in this direction, we recently signed a tripartite memorandum of understanding with Skyports and Volocopter to conduct a feasibility study for vertiport deployment
in the country. This collaboration is part of our five-year Subang Regeneration Plan to explore the use of revolutionary electric air taxi services in Subang Airport and other parts of the country.
Skyports is a world-leading designer and operator of vertiport infrastructure for electric air taxis while Volocopter is a pioneer of urban air mobility. The revolutionary air taxi technology is the
next big thing we want to see in our local aviation, especially with Asia Pacific expected to capture about 45% of the advanced air mobility market by 2035, which translates to US$9.5 billion. Indeed, it will be timely for us to explore this new service to complement other key developments in our regeneration initiative.