SilkAir

SilkAir (Singapore) Private Limited is a regional airline with its head office in Airline House in Singapore; previously it was on the fifth storey of the SIA Superhub in Singapore. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of Singapore Airlines and operates scheduled passenger services from Singapore to 44 cities in Southeast Asia, the Indian Subcontinent, China and Australia. As the regional wing of Singapore Airlines, it serves the short-haul destinations in the Singapore Airlines Group network. From March 2013 to March 2014, the airline flew 3.411 million passengers and made an operating profit of S$34.5 million.

As of 31 March 2014, SilkAir employs 1,462 staff.

History

The airline had its roots as a regional air-charter company as Tradewinds Charters formed in 1975, serving leisure destinations using planes predominantly leased from parent airline Singapore Airlines. Scheduled services were introduced as Tradewinds Airlines on 21 February 1989, when it leased McDonnell Douglas MD-87 aeroplanes for services to 6 destinations: Bandar Seri Begawan, Pattaya, Phuket, Hat Yai and Kuantan from Singapore's Changi International Airport and Tioman from Singapore's Seletar Airport. As the carrier matured, regional business destinations such as Jakarta, Phnom Penh and Yangon were added to its network, thereby broadening the airline's appeal beyond the holiday-maker to include the business traveller.

SilkAir Flight 185

SilkAir Flight 185 was a scheduled SilkAir passenger flight from Jakarta, Indonesia, to Singapore, which crashed into the Musi River near Palembang in southern Sumatra, on 19 December 1997, killing all 97 passengers and seven crew on board.

The cause of the crash was independently investigated by two agencies. The aircraft was built by Boeing in the United States, and the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), under lead investigator Greg Feith, participated in the investigation of the crash. They concluded that the crash was the result of deliberate flight control inputs, most likely by the captain. The Indonesian National Transportation Safety Committee (NTSC), led by Engineering Professor Oetarjo Diran, was unable to determine a cause of the crash.

Another potential factor that led to the crash of the 737 aircraft was the power control unit (PCU) that controlled the aircraft's rudder, which was the culprit in previous 737 crashes. Although the NTSB and PCU manufacturer Parker-Hannifin had already determined that the PCU was properly working, and thus not the cause of the crash, a private investigation into the crash for a civil lawsuit tried by jury in a California state court in Los Angeles, which was not allowed to hear or consider the NTSB's and Parker-Hannifin's conclusions, decided that the crash was caused by a defective servo valve inside the PCU, based on forensic findings from an electron microscope which determined that minute defects within the PCU had caused the rudder hard-over and a subsequent uncontrollable flight and crash. The manufacturer of the aircraft's rudder controls and the families later reached an out-of-court settlement.