Trust in Malaysian Airlines (MAS)?!

With the list of air disasters which happened to Malaysian Airlines in 2014, one would expect the airline company to take a long hard look at the corporation and start to buck up on its air crafts' service and maintenance. Are they really doing it?

With the mysterious disappearance of MH370 and the ill-fated MH17, one would have expected Malaysian Airlines (MAS) to buck up on its air crafts' service and maintenance and improve on their services, so that they could regain the confidence of all flyers across the globe. But the question is: Are they really taking it seriously?

Trusting that the Malaysian national carrier has got to be better than what the public generally said them to be after the two unfortunate incident, I booked a two-way flight to Taiwan on MAS for my year-end trip. Let's just say that I regretted it the moment I boarded the flight.

On 24 December 2014, I headed to KLIA to catch the red eye flight to Taipei, Taiwan. It was Christmas Eve and everybody was in a festive mood. Needless to say, the passenger were all smiley and happy and can’t wait to get on the flight.

First of all the flight was late. It wasn't delayed for hours, just a 15-20mins late in arrival and boarding. Taking the prep work needed to get the aircraft ready for a 5 hours flight into consideration, I think a 15mins delay is still acceptable, for me at least.

However, when I boarded the flight, I really couldn't believe my eyes! For a quick few seconds, I thought I have boarded a local budget airline for a domestic flight, although I clearly paid for something far better. The aircraft looked cramped and there were clearly NO in-flight entertainment unit instilled!

Ok, so maybe I was expecting too much. It has been almost 6-7 years since my MAS flight to Melbourne. But clearly, I wasn't the only one who was surprised by the condition. I overheard a family which was filing into the aircraft trying to find their seats commenting on why there is no "TV" available at all the seats. The same question which crossed my mind!

While waiting for the flight to take off, I heard one of the impatient passengers asked the air steward why there are no in-flight entertainment units available, which the steward explained that our plane was "switched" last minute due to some unforeseen circumstances and he is sorry for the inconvenience caused.

So you would think that this is a fair enough explanation, right? I mean, MAS is doing their job and getting their passengers on a safer craft. This should be something to applauded, right? Wrong.

As we waited for the flight to take off, nothing happened. Moments later, the captain came on to announce that we are having some technical problem and it will take awhile longer before we could take off.

Really?! Even after switching from an aircraft that (I assume) is supposed to provide better comfort for the passengers to a lighter aircraft that does not even have an in-flight entertainment unit and is supposedly NOT suffering from any "unforeseen circumstances", the aircraft is STILL having technical problems when it comes to taking off?!! This is the point that I started to question how often they run their service maintenance on all the aircraft!

In my head, the worse scenes from a lot of disaster movies are playing in a loop! What a way to treat your passengers on Christmas night! Good job MAS!!! The only thing I hoped during that whole flight was to reach Taipei safely and to be able to tell my mom, who warned me so much about flying with MAS, that I have arrived safely and I was wrong.

As if the scare of flying to Taipei wasn't bad enough, the flight back from Taipei to Kuala Lumpur was even worse!


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