Goh Choon Phong / Singapore Airlines COVID

Your biggest liability and your biggest asset are often the same thing. The difference is the question you're asking about it.

There's a detail from Singapore Airlines' darkest year I can't stop thinking about.

In October 2020, they converted two grounded A380s into pop-up restaurants at Changi Airport. No destination. No flight path. You'd board, eat a meal prepared by SIA's catering team, then walk back into Singapore.

Tickets sold out in 26 minutes. Suites seats — gone in under 10.

Goh Choon Phong spent 30 years at Singapore Airlines before becoming CEO. He wasn't a turnaround specialist parachuted in. He came up through IT and marketing — methodical, quiet, no cult of personality. The company man who knew every floor of the airline.

Then March 2020 happened.

In three weeks, SIA cancelled 96% of its scheduled flights. At the trough, the airline was carrying 10,000 passengers a month. Normal is 3.4 million. Monthly cash burn: S$300-400 million.

What Goh did next separated SIA from nearly every other airline.

He raised S$8.8 billion. A full equity rights issue — the largest capital raise in Singapore corporate history during a crisis. Most CEOs were taking bridge loans to survive a few months. Goh assumed the pandemic would last longer than anyone planned for, and that the airlines left standing when it ended would be the ones with liquidity, not the ones who'd cut the hardest.

Then he looked at his grounded planes differently.

He modified two 777-300ERs to carry cargo in the passenger cabin — seats removed, freight loaded where passengers used to sit. It looked like desperation. It was actually positioning. As global supply chains collapsed, cargo rates were spiking. SIA was running 137 weekly cargo services to 39 cities while other airlines parked their fleets.

Then the restaurants.

A grounded A380 is a liability. Hundreds of millions of dollars of aircraft sitting on tarmac, generating nothing. Goh asked a different question: what is it worth to someone who misses flying?

Sold out in 26 minutes.

In September 2020, he cut 4,300 jobs — the first compulsory redundancies in 17 years. His own words: "The hardest and most agonising decision I've made in 30 years with SIA." He didn't package it differently.

FY2020/21: SIA's worst-ever loss. Over S$2.5 billion. FY2023/24: SIA's best-ever profit. S$2.68 billion. Staff got 7.94 months bonus.

The cargo flights, the A380 restaurants, the S$8.8 billion raise — none of it was the obvious move. In a crisis, obvious is: cut, conserve, wait.

Goh asked a different question about everything he had.

A grounded passenger jet becomes a cargo freighter when you ask what it can carry. It becomes a restaurant when you ask what someone who misses flying would pay to sit inside one. The same asset. Three different questions. Three different answers.

Your biggest liability and your biggest asset are often the same thing.

The difference is the question you're asking about it.

What crisis forced you to look at something you had completely differently?