Singapore Airlines, extending cost cuts it has applied to senior managers, is asking pilots to take three or four days of unpaid leave each month. The carrier’s senior managers are already working fewer days a month and all other managers will be from May 1. Other employees, mostly cabin crew members, are voluntarily taking leave without pay. The local pilots’ association says Singapore Airlines is asking captains to take three days off each month and first officers four days a month.

Avic Aircraft, assuming control of a large chunk of the Chinese commercial aircraft industry, will reshape its business units in the pattern of Airbus. Old regional entities such as Xi’an Aircraft and Shaanxi Aircraft will be abolished and their assets reallocated along functional lines to create a framework of units each specializing in its own part of the aircraft, such as the wing or nose section.

China is accelerating reform of its military aircraft sector by bringing forward the establishment of a company that will be its national defense champion. Government and industry leaders have dropped plans to initially restrict the new business—a maker of fighters, trainers, drones and missiles—to the status of a division of national aeronautics conglomerate Avic (AW&ST Mar. 30, p. 40).