The world’s largest airlines by market cap, Singapore Airlines (SIA) announced its non likelihood of layoffs of its employees inspite of that the airlines plans to adjust in salaries, fuel costs and diversion of flight routes in order to survive the looming financial crisis.

The CEO of Singapore Airlines, Chew Choon Seng, said, "We are continuing to stay the course, take delivery of new aircraft as they come on. We still need people to be trained to man those new planes."

The airlines reported a 27 per cent drop in first-half earnings to S$682 million due to the increasing fuel costs and decrease in demand. The customers resorting to travel from air though have declined but SIA asserted that their business class traveller numbers have been steady.

Huang Cheng Eng, executive vice president, Marketing, SIA, said "In terms of travel by corporate accounts - the big boys – those that you know are in trouble have come down, but we also find that there are a lot of other niche and smaller financial institutions that are travelling quite a bit now because they are going all over the world to get business from what the big boys have lost. So that helps in a way."

The SIA said that the numbers appear to be halted but many of the business class travelers are now going for business class. However the scenario for second half of the year for the airlines will be more optimistic as the fleet plans to grow to 104 by March 2009.