qan worlds second best airline, page-10

Sally, the heart of the point I was trying to make was not that Qantas are great, but rather SIA are not nearly as polished as their glitz and press releases would have you believe. Better inflight service counts for nothing if the flight attendants can't get you through a door in an emergency... or their procedures have no "gross error checks"... or their culture is to save face at all costs (here I'm thinking of the 747 which landed in London last year with only 1.5 tons of fuel in it's tanks, vs 10 tons normally and 4.5 tons legal minimum because the crew didn't want to lose face by diverting en-route. If you were on that flight, you would never have known you were just 10 minutes flight time from death.)

SIA's policy is to be first with a press release, so that by the time the truth comes out it's old news and people only remember the first thing they read in the papers. Take the incident where the Captain turned off all the hydraulics in-flight by mistake over Central Australia... within hours SIA had issued a press release blaming turbulence. By the time the investigation was complete no-one was interested and only one newspaper wrote it up. It came back to bite them in the bum in Taipei, when they initially denied there was a crash, and then denied that there were any fatalities.

Qantas has been lucky over the years... however SIA have been much luckier, having only one fatal crash (two if you count SilkAir) out of dozens of close calls. Qantas has no culture of "saving face"... it's perfectly OK to point out a mistake the Captain may have made.
Why do you think SIA try to avoid mixing Singaporean and expatriate pilots on their flight decks? The suicide by the SilkAir Captain (taking 110 of his passengers with him) was caused in part by the loss of face he experienced when his New Zealander First Officer intervened when he made a mistake.

Scary stuff.