Speech by Senior Minister of State for Transport Dr Janil Puthucheary at the Aviation Community Reception 2018

Mr Edmund Cheng, Chairman, CAAS,

Friends in the Aviation Community,

1.    A very good evening and welcome to the 9^th Aviation Community Reception.

Introduction

2.     This is the soon-to-be opened new Seletar passenger terminal building. This airport is a significant part of the history of Singapore Aviation. First opened in 1929 as Singapore’s first military base. It briefly served as Singapore’s first civilian airport from 1930 until the opening of Kallang Airport in 1937.

3.     Seletar’s facilities have been continually upgraded over the years serving various segments of the aviation community and also adapting to what the aviation industry has had to respond to in terms of both the regional and global changes and ultimately complement Changi’s operations.

4.     This new larger terminal building will be able to handle about four times the handling capacity of the existing terminal and support expected growth of aviation demand in the coming years. This is a special moment for a shift in the growth for the aviation industry and the aviation community.

Singapore as a Thriving Air Hub

5.     Aviation industry and aviation community in Singapore has come a long way. Today, Changi is an important international air hub. Passenger movements for the first half of 2018 grew by 5% from the same period last year.

6.     We have seen the addition of Berlin and Warsaw as new city links to Changi in Singapore. Our non-stop flights to New York by Singapore Airline’s, the world’s longest non-stop flight, making a much-anticipated return later this year. These new flights will increase our connectivity and further strengthen Changi’s status as an air hub, and ultimately benefiting Singapore and Singaporeans.

7.     The success that we have had in terms of aviation, and the role that aviation is able to play for Singapore, has been a result of clear foresight and bold planning, responsive to new developments and anticipation of market opportunities. We have to and we have so far, institutionalise, embrace and take it to heart, this bold forward planning approach. The forward planning is important for this sector because the growth prospects for aviation are bright.

Sector Outlook

8.     The growth prospects for aviation are bright and we expect robust growth in air travel. The number of passengers in the Asia-Pacific region is expected to more than double to 3.5 billion passengers by 2036. We have to make sure that we continue to be relevant for the growth and that we are fully participating in the opportunity.

9.     We are making major infrastructural investments at Changi East in the coming years to position Changi to capture this growth, and increase Singapore’s connectivity to the world. You know that we are building a third runway, a Terminal 5 and Changi East Industrial Zone. But infrastructure, like this passenger terminal, like the big projects that we are putting in place in Changi, have to be complemented by implementation of policies, interventions to address what is happening in the labour force.

10.    We have an ageing population, a slowing labour force growth, and we have to strengthen our ability to respond to these for the air transport sector through innovation and productivity enhancements. We have to ultimately create better jobs for our workers and to help them upgrade their skills so that they can take advantage of the opportunities ahead, just as our aviation community and aviation industry wants to take advantage of the opportunities that are coming. These interventions for jobs, they coalesce around the industry transformation maps. Whether in this sector or other sectors, we have organised ourselves through the Committee on the Future Economy and now the Future Economy Council through sector-specific industry transformation maps.

Air Transport Industry Transformation Map (ITM)

11.    The Air Transport ITM was launched last year. Its approach, providing a roadmap for the future of Singapore Aviation, guiding ourselves and our industry partners on investments that innovation, tools to improve productivity, targets to improve jobs, ultimately founding on the deepening of skills acquisition by workers and allowing us to developing new businesses and new business models together to achieve our shared goals of a competitive air hub, a vibrant aviation industry and good jobs for Singaporeans.

12.    Some of our efforts through this approach are already bearing fruit and benefitting our workers at the airport. For example, with support of the Aviation Development Fund, SATS adapted automated guided vehicle technology to develop a food trolley platooning system.Workers now only need to push a relatively small food trolley, and the larger food trolleys will follow closely behind automatically. This is changing very significantly, the physical impact of the job, changing significantly the kind of workers that can do the job, and the working lifespan of the individual worker. Hopefully, it also improves the productivity of the worker and improve the carrying capacity. This is a small example of how our vision of innovation and productivity translates into benefits for our workers.

13.    To further support the aviation sector in implementing the ITM, the Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore (CAAS) will be launching several new initiatives. Let me highlight four.

14.    First, CAAS will be topping up the Aviation Development Fund (ADF) by $120m, which brings the total funding amount for the ADF to $280m, and supporting directly in investments in productivity-boosting initiatives.

15.    Second, following the successful completion of Aviation Challenges 1 and 2 last year, CAAS is launching a third Aviation Challenge to underscore our commitment to catalyse collaborative innovation to help us overcome existing operational challenges that do not have commercially available solutions today.

16.    Thirdly, we are expanding our enterprise development efforts for the fast-growing Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) sector. A Call-for-Proposal (CFP) for Unmanned Aviation Projects was launched in November last year.

17.    We want to encourage the co-creation of useful UAS technological applications with the industry. We hope very much that this is an opportunity for local companies to grow their businesses and expand overseas and tonight, we will announce four projects that have been selected for funding. Congratulations to the awardees. I look forward to the prototypes that you will be developing and learning more about the technologies, tools and opportunities that we are taking advantage of.

18.    Fourth, to further enhance the potential of our workforce, our tripartite partners have collaborated to develop the Skills Framework for Air Transport. This Skills Framework, like all of our Skills Framework, that we are trying to develop through the ITM process, through the economic transformation that we are trying to ride, helps and establishes a common skills language for the industry, training providers, schools, workers, job seekers, and students. Making sure that we are speaking the same language when it comes to how we think about training, what are our competencies and capabilities to tease apart, what are the training structures that we need to put in place, what are the capabilities that we need to develop in order to help workers upgrade their professional skills and how can these skills map to a career progression to give workers as well as their employees some clarity over career progression.

19.    The Framework will help students and workers identify appropriate pre-employment training, continuing education and training programmes respectively, which they can register for via the MySkillsFuture portal.

20.    Director-General of the CAAS will share more details of these new initiatives shortly.

Conclusion

21.    We are always excited about Aviation. Aviation is a series of exciting opportunities and this is one more exciting juncture of the journey of Singapore Aviation.

22.    We are making headway on our plans and we have to continue to be proactive in seeking out innovative solutions, taking risks and embracing change.

23.    My deepest appreciation to our tripartite partners from the unions and industry for working closely with the Government in the growth and transformation of the aviation sector.Let us work together and continue this partnership and ensure the Singapore Aviation continues to play an important central and critical role to the well-being of our nation and economy.

24.    Thank you.