Malaysia Airlines’ regional subsidiary Firefly has got the green light to resume flights to Singapore’s Seletar Airport after a months-long airspace spat between Malaysia and Singapore.
The airline will restart services to Singapore on April 21, nearly five months after a row over airspace rights forced the airline to suspend services.
It all began when Firefly was forced to relocate its turboprop services from Changi Airport to Singapore’s secondary airport at Seletar near the Johor Strait.
To do this Singapore planned to implement a new instrument landing system (ILS) there but Malaysia opposed it as it claimed it would encroach on Malaysian airspace.
Malaysia then banned all civilian aircraft from the affected area at a certain altitude and the countries have been squabbling over the issue ever since.
Now an amicable agreement has been reached ‘in the spirit of bilateral cooperation.’
Both Singapore’s planned ILS procedures and Malaysia’s flying restrictions have been lifted.
That paves the way for Firefly to restart its services. It claimed it was losing up to $6 million in lost revenue a month, affecting about 13,000 passengers.
