MALAYSIA Airlines (MAS) kicked off on January 6 the first in a series of pre-determined route cuts with the termination of twice-weekly services between Kota Kinabalu and Osaka.
On January 31, the airline’s thrice-weekly Kota Kinabalu-Perth services will cease, followed by the ending of four-weekly services between Kota Kinabalu and Tokyo (Haneda) and Seoul from February 1 and February 21, respectively. All these services were operated with Boeing 737-800 aircraft.
MAS group CEO Ahmad Jauhari Yahya said: “This suspension is until further notice and is part of our regional network consolidation involving single-aisle aircraft operations. We will be reviewing this situation in about three months time from the date of the first route suspension, and will be deciding further by early April 2012.”
Besides maintaining daily B737-800 flights linking Kota Kinabalu to Hong Kong and Taipei, Malaysia Airlines will be codesharing on Korean Air’s flights from Seoul to Kota Kinabalu. There are also 86 weekly flights from Kuala Lumpur that will provide one-stop services to the affected destinations.
These cuts are part of broader efforts by MAS to slash loss-making routes, which include flights from Kuala Lumpur to Capetown, Johannesburg, Rome, Karachi, Dubai, Damman, Surabaya and Buenos Aires.
