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Changi Airport’s T4 is a folly: Scoot CEO

SYDNEY — Singapore Airlines budget carrier Scoot Airways does not want to use the city’s new airport terminal and regards the S$1.28 billion facility as a “folly”, said the unit’s CEO.

SYDNEY — Singapore Airlines budget carrier Scoot Airways does not want to use the city’s new airport terminal and regards the S$1.28 billion facility as a “folly”, said the unit’s CEO.

Changi Airport’s Terminal Four (T4), which is being designed to handle 16 million passengers a year when it opens in 2017, does not have good-enough connections to the rest of the airport, said Scoot CEO Campbell Wilson at a conference in Sydney yesterday.

T4 has a shortage of slots for wide-body aircraft such as Scoot’s Boeing 787s, he said.

The airline, which has flown about three million passengers since it started services in June 2012, is owned by Changi’s largest user, SIA, and code-shares flights with budget carrier Tiger Airways, in which the city state’s flag carrier has a 40 per cent stake. Cathay Pacific Airways in April became the first carrier to announce a move to the new terminal.

“This terminal is a big folly, frankly,” Mr Wilson said at the event.

“It really detracts from the whole purpose of building a hub airport in the first place and I think it would be a very severe retrograde step for Changi.”

A shift to T4 “is not an attractive proposition for us and so, therefore, it is not something we are looking to do”, he said later on the sidelines of the event.

“On balance, we would likely stay at the main terminals.”

Mr Ivan Tan, a spokesman for Changi, could not immediately comment. BLOOMBERG

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