"Our main concern and priority is always on ensuring passenger safety and getting them to the boarding gates or arrival hall on time," says Malaysia Airports managing director, Datuk Badlisham Ghazali.
According to Badlisham, as mechanical problems are inevitable in any operational environment, our SOP is meant to ensure that passengers on board a halted train will be transported to the stations as quick as possible, whether to the gates or arrival hall. We are very concerned that some passengers had ignored the safety announcements on the Aerotrain for them to remain on board, but instead had prised opened the door to disembark midway during yesterday's incident. Our recovery SOP would have ensured that the passengers were properly evacuated and escorted to the station if necessary, as had been done during the past breakdowns. We would like to remind passengers to observe the announcements and instructions on board the train during a breakdown, for their own safety and convenience. We have efficient recovery plans in place. A standby technical officer is available to manually drive the train to the station. There is also a second train as well as 10 shuttle buses ready to transport passengers during a breakdown.”
“We have embarked on a major maintenance and overhaul programme for the Aerotrains to provide better reliability and service to our passengers. As passenger numbers at KLIA have been increasing, we have also activated full time shuttle bus services as another mode of people mover between the main terminal and satellite building to augment the Aerotrain services. The shuttle bus service is available 24 hours daily and only takes 5 minutes to get across.”