A total of 6,000 staff at loss-making Malaysia Airlines will lose their jobs in a massive restructuring.
A further 14,000 will be offered employment with the new Malaysia Airlines Bhd group.
MAS Bhd will be grouped into three divisions – operations, support functions and learning and development with a total of 12 subsidiaries.
New chief executive Christoph Mueller – former boss of Aer Lingus – said that under the operations division there would be the passenger airline, budget arm MAS Wings, rural air service Firefly and MAS Cargo.
The aim is to keep Malaysia Airlines as an international full-fledged service carrier and not a regional airline. It will also retain all its domestic routes.
A three-phased turnaround plan is due to run until 2018.
Mueller said that the next two years would be a time for MAS to bite the bullet before the company could resume growth again.
“2016 to 2017 will be restructuring years; 2017 to 2018 will be where we will start to grow again,” he was reported saying.
The restructure plans follow the loss of two Boeing 777s just five months apart last year. Flight 370 with 239 people on board disappeared in the southern Indian Ocean in March 2014 and Flight 17 with 298 passengers and crew crashed in Ukraine after it was believed to have been hit by a surface to air missile.