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SINGAPORE – Bilateral travel corridors for vaccinated passengers from places with low to moderate infection rates may happen in the second half of this year, Transport Minister Ong Ye Kung said on Friday (March 12), as Singapore continues to explore. ways to open your borders. and reactivate air travel.
In an interview with Money FM 89.3, Ong said stay-at-home notices and other quarantine measures will cut off travel. Singapore, he added, needs to find ways to get rid of such requirements, a point he also made last week during his ministry’s budget debate.
“No one is going to come to Singapore and stay 14 days,” he told radio DJ Elliott Danker.
While vaccines are changing the game, this should work in conjunction with other measures such as testing, movement restrictions and identifying countries that are “safe” and have successfully controlled the virus, Ong said.
For example, Singapore could open up to travelers from places with moderate rates of Covid-19 infection but have ongoing vaccination programs.
“(Combine that) with testing, and you can possibly open up a safe travel corridor,” he added.
On air travel bubbles, Ong said such deals require reciprocity, noting that Singapore has already unilaterally opened its borders to travelers from countries and territories that control the virus, such as Australia, New Zealand and China, and this has not led to aa community infections here.
“Unfortunately, we are the only safe place in the world that is opening up to others like that,” Ong said.
“If only others start doing it, then we will have a bubble, you will reciprocate, you will be able to start traveling. And I hope that sometime this year we can do it.”
Singapore’s air travel bubble with Hong Kong, which was supposed to start last November, remains frozen as the city saw another outbreak of cases this week.
Ong said Singapore is still in a “crisis situation,” noting that passenger volume at Changi Airport is only 2.6 percent of the levels seen before the Covid-19 pandemic.
He said he shared the same opinion as the director of the International Air Transport Association (Iata), Alexandre de Juniac, who told The Straits Times this week that personal and leisure travel will return from the second half of this year. .
However, Mr. Ong cautioned that this was neither an estimate nor a prediction, but rather “an assumption”, reiterating that it was unrealistic to expect the aviation sector here to make a “V-shaped” recovery.
He said the virus “wants to take over the world.”
“It will mutate, it is transmitted without symptoms, and you don’t know what curveballs it will throw at us next.
“(But) many countries and places have a control over the issue, not only based on vaccination, but also on tests, social distancing, masks and different methods … I think all these different measures, plus vaccination , they are going to have an impact.
“We will improve on that. So I think this is the base from which we think there should be some recovery.”
When asked if there is enough workforce in the aviation sector to recover, after several downsizing exercises last year, Ong said that these reductions constituted “a single digit percentage” of the entire workforce. and they were assumed mainly by foreign workers.
“It takes years, even a decade, to train a pilot, and even the aircrew. Air traffic controllers, for example, require years of training. So you don’t even want to be in that position where you lose talent. You lose your core ability and when things pick up, you can’t get them back, “he said.
Mr. Ong added: “What we have done is hold on to the workforce as much as we can, with the conviction that one day this will recover … The problem you mentioned would be because the sector has expanded, things are reviving.
“Then we can attract people. But the key is not to lose your core capabilities. Your core staff must remain intact.”
The Employment Support Program, which has been extended for another six months for the aviation sector, has contributed to this.
In his interview with ST earlier this week, Mr. de Juniac said that Iata is already working with various states to design and plan protocols and roadmaps for border reopening.
One of the main of these protocols is Iata’s Travel Pass, a mobile health verification app that electronically captures a traveler’s vaccination history and Covid-19 test results for cross-border security checks.
Singapore Airlines has been the first airline to officially announce that it will begin testing the Iata Travel Pass on flights from Singapore to London.
Meanwhile, China has also just announced the launch of its vaccine passport, while Germany and the United States are set to introduce theirs soon.
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