PAL President and Chief Operating Officer Capt. Stanley K. Ng noted that the pandemic issues are still being experienced by the airline, particularly problems pertaining to the supply chain.
A major hurdle is the continuing Pratt and Whitney (P&W) maintenance operations that have previously grounded eight of PAL's planes. Now, they still have five grounded A321neos.
This has prompted the airline to reduce frequencies of flights, which "sacrificed a lot of revenues," said Ng.
"That's the main one, the P&W. Last year, it's supposedly better now. However, they found another issue with the powdered metal. Now they're just trying to be safe. They have to do the inspection of the engines more frequently. That's why our hangars are full," he remarked.
"It's hard to grow when you have those issues. Since last year, we tried to really have a spare for every type of aircraft to make sure we can maintain our schedule reliability. It's costly, however, with the passengers in mind, we have to be reliable and on-time," Ng added.
He also expressed the airline's interest in exploring new route options, but stressed that they are focused on beefing up their fleet first.
"We will have to wait for our new airplanes to come in before launching [new routes], because we also want to make sure that we can serve our passengers with reliability. We don't want to add a lot of destinations too soon," Ng said.
https://mb.com.ph/2024/4/2/pal-expects-22-new-aircraft-in-next-five-years#google_vignette
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