Singapore and Hong Kong: Two Paths Through the Same Disruption

When the US and Israel attacked Iran earlier in the year and Emirates, Etihad and Qatar Airways pulled back their networks, a massive supply shock occurred for traffic from Asia and Australia to Europe. Two airlines were positioned to absorb the displaced traffic: Singapore Airlines and Cathay Pacific. Both are Asian super-connectors. Both have premium products. Both are based out of global cities. Both serve London, Paris and the major European business gateways. Both had the same time period to respond.

Three months on, Singapore Airlines is forecast to fly 128 weekly departures to Europe this Northern Winter — the largest European network in its history. Meanwhile, Cathay Pacific’s European network remains smaller than it was in 2019.

This isn't a story about strategy in 2026. It's a story about three decisions — about fleet, capital structure, and bilateral air services treaties — that long pre-date the Iran conflict, and that put Singapore and Hong Kong on different paths. The question this piece asks is a structural one: which airline, and which city, was better positioned to capture the redirected demand? And as a consequence of those same structural differences, why has Cathay had to be more creative and nimble in rebuilding capacity — pushing into new markets like Central Asia, with the imminent launch of Hong Kong-Almaty — while Singapore Airlines extends its reach further into Europe?

Before the data, one important framing point. Both airlines have navigated the pandemic with a resilience that markets have recognised. Singapore Airlines and Cathay Pacific have each broadly doubled in market value over the past five years from their COVID lows — a remarkable recovery by any measure, and one that stands in sharp contrast to airlines that entered the crisis without the same balance sheet depth. Cathay returned to profit in 2023, posted HK$9.8 billion net profit in FY2024, and grew that to HK$10.82 billion in FY2025 — up 9.5% year-on-year — with a cargo business that has consistently outperformed through the disruption. Singapore Airlines, despite its capacity leadership, has faced its own complications — including questions about whether its 25.1% stake in Air India, acquired as part of the Tata-led privatisation in 2022, will prove earnings-accretive over the medium term. Unfettered capacity expansion is not, by itself, the most profit-accretive strategy. The comparison in this piece is a narrow one: about which airline is structurally positioned to capture Europe-bound demand in a specific, time-limited window. On that scorecard, the divergence is stark.

The numbers on the ground

Start with what’s happening this Northern Winter:

Singapore Airlines will operate 128 weekly flights to 15 European cities, including the return to Madrid for the first time since 2004 (via Barcelona). London alone gets 38 weekly flights — 28 to Heathrow and 10 to Gatwick, a record. SIA’s senior network planner, Behramjee Ghadially, is publicly on the record that the airline is “bullish in forecasting that passengers bound between Europe and Australasia will prefer to fly via an airport that is not in the Gulf.”

Cathay Pacific, by contrast, has rebuilt but never caught up — and the December numbers tell a sharper story than the summer ones. Current schedule data for December 2026, shows Cathay filed at 395 flights and 113,545 seats to Europe — a near-flat +0.5% on flights YoY but down 5.9% on seats versus December 2025. Indexed against December 2019, Cathay sits at 92.5% of 2019 flights but only 85.7% of 2019 seats, with ASKs at 85.3% of 2019. Its April 2026 response to the Middle East crisis was real but modest: three extra weekly pairs each to Paris and Zurich, and 13 London flight pairs upgauged to larger aircraft. No new European destinations beyond the 2025 restorations of Brussels and addition of Munich. No restoration of London Gatwick. The summer 2026 picture is similar — 431 August flights and 136,425 seats, still 18.5% below 2019 on flights and 17% below on seats.

What “tactical” looks like in practice: in May 2026, Cathay’s Regional Head of Distribution Partnerships for Europe took to LinkedIn to announce that the airline was adding extra services to Rome and Manchester in August — two return flights each, on 14 and 21 August for Rome (FCO) and 23 and 30 August for Manchester (MAN). Four additional return services across an entire month. It is a genuine addition and the team deserves credit for placing capacity where demand is strongest. But it is also the clearest possible illustration of the constraint underneath the strategy. Singapore Airlines added 85 flights month-on-month between December 2025 and December 2026 alone. Cathay is adding four return services in August — and announcing it as a milestone.

On the same day this post was first drafted — 25 May 2026 — Singapore Airlines issued a press release announcing Amsterdam frequencies would increase from daily to 10-times-weekly between 1 August and 22 October, operated by A350-900LH. That single route addition in that single window adds more capacity than Cathay is adding across its entire European network in August. The SIA SVP for Marketing Planning named the full sequence of 2026 European enhancements in the same announcement: Madrid (new, 5x weekly via Barcelona), Manchester (to daily), Milan (to daily), Munich (to 10x weekly), London Gatwick (to double-daily), now Amsterdam (to 10x weekly). Six European route upgrades in a single season. The contrast with four Cathay return flights to Rome and Manchester is not a debating point — it is the data.

A note on the December seat figure: it’s possible Cathay’s filed seat count rises closer to departure as Aria Suite retrofit decisions and aircraft sub-type assignments firm up. Cathay’s ongoing 777-300ER retrofit cycle (14 of a planned 30 aircraft completed as of October 2025, each requiring around seven weeks of downtime in Xiamen) means the airline does not publicly commit subfleet to routes at advance booking time the way SIA does. Premium travel publications now routinely warn passengers that “the airline may change the aircraft or schedule at any time, even at the last minute.” This is a commercial constraint as much as a data artefact — corporate buyers and premium passengers booking 6-12 months out cannot reliably lock in cabin product, compromising forward yield management in the precise window when post-crisis premium demand is strongest. Even allowing for ASKs to rise as fleet assignments firm up, the underlying picture is one of flat European frequencies.

Singapore Airlines, by contrast, was already past its 2019 European operation by August 2024 — 513 flights and 151,768 seats vs 477 and 155,018 in 2019. The 2026 record is the continuation of a four-year trajectory, not a Middle East windfall. By December 2026, SIA is filed at 577 flights and 161,609 seats to Europe — +21.7% on flights and +11.7% on seats versus December 2019, and 46% more flights than Cathay in the same month. SIA’s ASK gap over Cathay in December 2026 is 36% — wider than the 26% August gap, because winter is the first full selling season redirected traffic can be captured. The Middle East crisis is incremental on top of a position SQ was already building.

Changi’s Q1 2026 numbers reinforce the operational picture: 17.6 million passengers (+2.3% YoY), with the rolling 12-month total of 70.4 million the highest in the airport’s history — despite Singapore-Middle East traffic falling 80% year-on-year in March 2026. Changi is not just absorbing Gulf-displaced traffic; the redirected Australia-Europe flows are landing on top of an already record-breaking base.

The Qantas redirect and the bilateral treaty that made it possible

The most visible single piece of evidence is what Qantas has done with its kangaroo routes. From 20 April 2026, Qantas QF33/34 Sydney-Perth-Paris stopped operating nonstop and now routes Sydney-Singapore-Paris, with a return via the same pattern. The Perth-London QF9 has been routing via Singapore since 4 March 2026. Qantas additionally added three weekly Perth-Singapore frequencies to feed the broader Singapore network.

What made this redirect possible at speed is something most coverage of the crisis hasn’t surfaced: Australia and Singapore operate under an open skies agreement, while Australia and Hong Kong do not.

The Air New Zealand JV picture makes the same point from a different angle — and is all the more striking because Air New Zealand operates joint ventures with both Singapore Airlines and Cathay Pacific simultaneously.

On 28 May 2026, Air New Zealand and Singapore Airlines jointly announced a major expansion of their New Zealand-Singapore network for Northern Winter 2026 (25 October 2026 to 27 March 2027): overall seat capacity between Singapore and New Zealand up 17%, adding 72,000 seats to bring the total to more than 490,000 seats across the season. The specifics: Air New Zealand launches brand new non-stop Christchurch-Singapore services (3x weekly on 787-9), adding to SIA’s existing Christchurch operations to peak at 15 combined weekly services. Air New Zealand adds 4x weekly Auckland-Singapore. And SIA upgauges its daily Auckland service from 777-300ER to A380 — 471 seats in four classes including Suites — to capture the demand surge.

The CX-Air NZ JV, by contrast, has announced no equivalent Northern Winter 2026 expansion. The most recent public data shows Hong Kong-Auckland running at just 11 weekly in Northern Winter 2026 — significantly lower than the same period pre-pandemic. Cathay’s Christchurch service remains a seasonal operation, 4x weekly at peak between December and February. The JV was re-authorised by New Zealand regulators for five more years as recently as November 2024; the partnership is intact and Cathay expanded Auckland to 11 weekly for Q1 2026. But the structural growth for Northern Winter 2026 is all flowing through Singapore, not Hong Kong.

Air New Zealand is rationally directing its growth where the open skies treaty, the hub’s connectivity, and the SIA partnership give it the most commercial upside. It has a JV with Cathay too, and is honouring it — but it is not growing through it at anything like the same pace. The contrast tells you more about the relative attractiveness of the two hubs than any analyst note could.

Australia has open skies arrangements with only seven nations — China, India, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, the US, and the UK. Under the Singapore agreement, carriers from either country can operate unlimited frequencies to any city in the other without ministerial approval. Qantas was therefore able to redirect entire kangaroo route services through Changi on a few weeks’ notice — adding aircraft, slots, and passenger volume into Singapore — without anyone needing to approach a transport minister or renegotiate a treaty.

The Australia-Hong Kong arrangement is the opposite. The bilateral, originally signed in 1993, has now been fully exhausted for Hong Kong carriers despite recent expansion. Cathay Pacific operates up to 77 weekly flights to Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth — and that is the cap. The Australian government’s own International Air Services Commission has confirmed there is no available capacity remaining for Hong Kong carriers to add frequencies to any of Australia’s four major gateways. Any growth must come from larger aircraft, not additional flights.

Hong Kong has historically shown limited interest in renegotiating this bilateral; senior Australian officials publicly stated as recently as 2022 that Hong Kong remained one of the markets least willing to expand traffic rights. To Hong Kong’s credit, Cathay CEO Ronald Lam noted in September 2025 that Hong Kong had broadened bilateral agreements with more than ten aviation partners over the previous two years — but Australia, the precise market where the 2026 redirected demand exists, was not among the ones that delivered new gateway capacity at the scale required.

So even if Cathay had wanted to absorb the redirected flow — pick up codeshare feed from New Zealand, add capacity into Sydney or Melbourne to support it — the treaty framework simply wouldn’t have allowed it at speed. Singapore’s broader ecosystem advantage is this: liberal bilateral arrangements with 60+ nations, transparent slot allocation at Changi, and a transport ministry that treats aviation liberalisation as core economic policy. When a capacity shock hits, Singapore is structurally agile in a way Hong Kong cannot — and that agility is the precondition for the fleet response that follows.

The fleet decision that determined 2026 — made in 2020

Treaty room only matters if you have the metal to use it. Here is where the story sharpens.

Both Cathay and SQ entered COVID with broadly comparable long-haul widebody fleets. They had access to different capital sources, and made very different choices.

Cathay sold its way through the pandemic. In March 2020, Cathay sold six Boeing 777-300ERs to BOC Aviation for $703.8 million in a sale-leaseback to raise emergency cash. By October 2021, 68 of its aircraft were parked. As Hong Kong’s borders remained largely closed through 2022 and the 777-9 replacement programme slipped repeatedly (now delayed to 2027 at earliest), Cathay quietly let leased widebodies go back to lessors rather than renewing.

Singapore Airlines had a different option available. Backed by majority shareholder Temasek, SIA raised approximately S$15.4 billion in fresh liquidity from April 2020 onwards — including S$8.8 billion from a rights issue, S$2.1 billion in secured financing, and S$2.0 billion from convertible bonds, all underwritten or backstopped by Temasek. Sale-and-leasebacks did happen — S$2.0 billion across 11 aircraft (seven A350-900s and four 787-10s) was completed in May 2021 — but they were a supplement to a much larger capital raise rather than the primary survival mechanism. SIA’s long-haul fleet has held steady at 75 aircraft since November 2024 when the final A350 Long Haul was delivered. There was no fire sale of long-haul widebodies, no mass return of leased aircraft to lessors during the pandemic.

The strategic consequence of avoiding a fleet fire-sale is one that’s only visible in hindsight: optionality. When SIA opted not to liquidate long-haul widebodies, it implicitly preserved the option to respond to demand shocks the moment they appeared. When Boeing then slipped 777-9 deliveries to 2027, the airlines that had retained their existing widebodies had cover. Cathay, having shed aircraft for cash in 2020 and let leases lapse in 2022-2024, had no such cover. The 777-9 delay punished both carriers equally on paper, but only Cathay had no cushion underneath.

The aircraft Cathay shed during 2020-2024 are now flying for its direct competitors. Tracking the public records:

• Qatar Airways: 4 confirmed ex-Cathay 777-300ERs (A7-BOA, A7-BOB, A7-BOC, and A7-BOD), leased from BOC Aviation starting late 2021. Still operating with Cathay’s original four-class cabin including First Class. Per Air Finance Global, Lesha Bank acquired five additional 777-300ERs in late 2024 believed to be on lease to Qatar.
• Air New Zealand: 3 ex-Cathay 777-300ERs (ZK-OKU, ZK-OKV, ZK-OKW) on three-year dry leases via Air Lease Corporation from late 2023, deployed on Auckland-Houston, Auckland-Los Angeles and trans-Tasman routes. Air NZ kept Cathay’s interior including the 6-suite First Class cabin, marketed as “Business Premier Preferred.”
• T’way Air: 2 ex-Cathay 777-300ERs (one was previously B-KQK) from late 2024 onwards, deployed precisely on Seoul-Paris, Seoul-Frankfurt, Seoul-Rome, Seoul-Barcelona and Seoul-Zagreb — the European routes T’way received as part of the Korean Air-Asiana merger remedy. The aircraft are flying in Cathay’s four-class cabin, including the First Class. One was returned by Cathay to its lessor in September 2024 in anticipation of 777-9 deliveries in 2025 that never came.
• Korean Air: 1 ex-Cathay 2013-vintage 777-300ER leased from Incline Aviation in March 2025.
• Additional aircraft are even operating for Turkmenistan Airlines; whilst some have been parted out.
• The implication of this is that in 2026 you can fly a Cathay Pacific First Class seat between Auckland and Houston, or ironically on a low-cost carrier between Seoul and Paris, but you can’t fly in Cathay First Class from Hong Kong to Paris.

Conservative count: at least 10 ex-Cathay 777-300ERs are now flying for competing carriers, with roughly 300 seats each — call it 3,000 daily seats of long-haul capacity operating against Cathay on routes Cathay would otherwise have flown. The T’way deployment is the rhetorical kill shot: Cathay’s own 777s, in Cathay’s own cabin, flying ICN-CDG against Cathay’s HKG-CDG.

The hub strategy that 2026 would have rewarded — if Cathay still had the aircraft

Pre-COVID, Cathay was actively building a second daily wave into its European network — exactly the kind of capacity expansion that 2026 would now reward. In summer 2019, Cathay Pacific Paris went double daily, with the additional services operated by A350-900s timed close to existing 777 services to feed a second hub bank in Hong Kong. Frankfurt was a daily 777-300ER service with seasonal additions. London Gatwick was a daily A350-900 service — Cathay’s second London airport, launched in September 2016 with a four-times-weekly service that scaled to daily, complementing five-times-daily Heathrow. The architecture for Hong Kong as a true double-wave European connecting hub was visibly being built.

Then COVID hit. Gatwick was dropped completely and never restored. The double-daily Paris pattern reverted to a single daily. The 777-300ERs that would have enabled the restoration of second-wave European frequencies were sold, returned to lessors, or turned into parts.

In 2026, with Middle Eastern carriers pulling back and Asia-Europe demand spiking to levels not seen since 2018-2019, Cathay would have been positioned to reinstate the double-daily Paris, London-Gatwick amongst others — if it still had those long-haul-configured 777-300ERs sitting at Chek Lap Kok. It does not. They are in Doha, Auckland, Seoul and Ashgabat.

Cathay CEO Ronald Lam was asked about this specific question in October 2024 — whether Cathay would follow Singapore Airlines back into Gatwick. His response, on the record: “When we talk about pre-pandemic, it’s already five years ago. So our goal is not to look at what we had five years ago… we’re not necessarily just eyeing what we had in 2019.”

The honest reading is that this isn’t strategic restraint. It’s a constraint dressed up as a strategy. Cathay’s 14 retrofitted Aria Suite 777-300ERs and 35 ordered 777-9s (now slipping to 2027) won’t deliver new long-haul capacity in time for the 2026 winter window. The Middle East shock is a one-time, finite passenger redistribution event. By the time Cathay has the metal to chase it, the Gulf carriers will be back.

The complication on Singapore’s side

To be fair to the analysis: Singapore Airlines’ position isn’t quite the unmitigated capacity boom it appears. Per SIA’s May 2026 fleet development plan, the long-haul fleet will actually shrink by one aircraft in FY26 (one 777-300ER retirement, no long-haul replacements) — the first long-haul reduction since 2020. The A350 Long Haul retrofit programme starting late 2026 will pull 2-3 aircraft out of service at any given time for cabin upgrades, with first redeliveries in Q1 2027. The 777-9 was supposed to be delivering new long-haul capacity by now; instead it’s slipped to 2027 alongside Cathay’s.

So both carriers are constrained by the same Boeing delays. The difference is that SQ entered the constraint period at 75 long-haul aircraft, kept utilisation high, and benefits from a treaty framework that accommodates rapid redirected demand. Cathay entered the same period structurally smaller, having taken cash for aircraft in 2020, with a bilateral treaty that capped Australian growth even if the metal had been available.

Two airlines, two capacity strategies — shaped by the same constraint

Cathay's response is not a story of failure — it is a story of constraint. The Almaty announcement, made on 2 June 2026 as part of a high-level HKSAR government delegation to Kazakhstan led by Chief Executive John Lee, illustrates something more nuanced: Cathay is building capacity actively, but the fleet it has available is shaping where that capacity can go.

Cathay plans to launch 3x weekly Hong Kong-Almaty in Q1 2027 on Airbus A330-300 — the only direct service linking Hong Kong and Kazakhstan, framed explicitly as a Belt and Road initiative connecting Hong Kong with “an important Belt and Road aviation hub in Central Asia.” It is a genuine strategic move. Hong Kong-Almaty at roughly 4,300km is a sensible A330-300 deployment: the aircraft has the range, the mission makes commercial sense for cargo and business travel, and Cathay and HK Express together already operate close to 600 return flights per week to 33 Belt and Road destinations.

But the A330-300 cannot fly Hong Kong to London. It cannot fly Hong Kong to Paris. At 9,400-9,600km, those sectors require the 777-300ER or A350 — the very aircraft Cathay no longer has in sufficient numbers to chase the European opportunity simultaneously. Cathay’s Cairns A330-300 seasonal service ran its last flights in late February 2026 and has since disappeared quietly from the forward schedule — no announcement, simply absent from future bookings. The Almaty announcement now follows on the same aircraft type. Whether or not the same frames are being redirected, the pattern is legible: Cathay’s available mid-range widebody capacity is moving toward new medium-haul markets where it can create unique connectivity — Central Asia, regional China — rather than toward the European rebuild where the aircraft simply lacks the range.

This is not a bad strategy. It is a rational response to the fleet position Cathay finds itself in. Building unique Hong Kong-Almaty connectivity, reinforcing Belt and Road alignment, and leveraging A330-300 economics on sectors suited to that aircraft is coherent. But it is a different strategy to Singapore Airlines’ — and the divergence is being driven as much by what each airline has available to deploy as by what each airline has chosen to prioritise.

Singapore Airlines, with 75 long-haul widebodies kept in service through the pandemic, can add 85 European flights in a single month-on-month comparison and simultaneously upgauge Auckland to A380. Cathay, working through Aria Suite retrofits on a reduced 777-300ER fleet while waiting for 777-9s that won’t arrive until 2027, is building where its available aircraft can reach. The fleet decisions of 2020 are not just determining who captures the 2026 European wave. They are determining the entire geographic shape of each airline’s recovery.

What this leaves us with

The “Middle East capacity vacuum” story is sometimes told as if it created an opportunity any well-positioned Asian super-connector could capture. The actual evidence suggests something more specific: the opportunity was sized for one carrier, not two.

Three things had to be in place to absorb the displaced Asia-Europe and redirected Australia-Europe traffic at speed: a liberal bilateral framework that allowed inbound capacity to surge without diplomatic process, a fleet of long-haul widebodies sitting in service-ready condition, and the financial structure to have preserved that fleet through 2020-2024 rather than monetising it.

Singapore had all three. For Hong Kong, each presented a structural headwind.

Singapore Airlines didn’t necessarily out-strategise Cathay Pacific in 2026. The agility of the Singapore aviation ecosystem — open skies treaties with Australia and 60+ other nations, a transport ministry that treats liberalisation as economic policy, transparent slot allocation, a flag carrier with Temasek capital backing — meant that when the moment arrived, the bilateral framework, the airline’s fleet, and the airport’s ability to absorb growth all moved in the same direction simultaneously. Hong Kong’s ecosystem moves slower by design: an Australian bilateral never renegotiated to scale, a flag carrier that returned widebodies to shore up its balance sheet in 2020, and a 777-9 replacement programme that won’t deliver in time.

The aircraft now flying for Qatar Airways, Air New Zealand and T'way Air are perhaps the clearest illustration of how consequential pandemic-era decisions have proven — not just for fleet planning, but for which city is best placed to grow when the next opportunity arrives.

Sources

• Cirium schedule data. CX and SQ Asia-Europe capacity, August snapshots 2019/2024/2025/2026.
• Singapore Airlines press releases. SQ Europe expansion 8 May 2026, SQ Western Sydney 24 Mar 2026, SQ sale-and-leaseback 3 May 2021.
• Mainly Miles fleet analyses. Sep 2025, Dec 2025, Mar 2026, May 2026.
• Simple Flying. SQ 128 weekly Europe; SQ 6-daily London; Cathay Munich; ex-Cathay 777 destinations.
• Air Finance Global. 777-300ER values and lease rates, 31 Jul 2025.
• ch-aviation. Qatar ex-Cathay leases.
• Cathay Pacific traffic releases. Feb-April 2026.
• HKIA Q1 2026 statistics
• Changi Q1 2026 statistics
• Travel Weekly, Aspire Travel Club, Aviation A2Z. Cathay April capacity response.
• Qantas travel updates and CAPA. Sydney-Singapore-Paris reroute.
• Head for Points. CEO Ronald Lam interview, October 2024.
• Business Traveller. Cathay Paris double-daily, 2019.
• Routes Online. Cathay UK pre-pandemic frequencies.
• Australian Aviation, IASC determinations. Australia-Hong Kong bilateral capacity.
• Australian Government Treaty Series ATS 28/1993
• The Conversation / UNSW. Australian open skies framework.
• SIAS, Temasek, Asian Aviation. SIA COVID rights issue.