Speech by Second Minister for Defence, Mr Chan Chun Sing, at the Singapore Amazing Flying Machine Competition (SAFMC) Awards Presentation

A very good afternoon to all friends, colleagues and students. I am not going to give you a long speech but are you enjoying yourself? If you are not enjoying yourself, you are not going to come up with a nice product tomorrow. I am not going to tell you many things but I want to share two things with you. Actually, it is one story and one challenge.

How many of you have been to Changi Airport? I presume all of you must have been to Changi Airport. I am going to tell you a bit about the story of Changi Airport, Singapore Airlines, how we grow as a nation, and where technology came in to provide us with the opportunities and at the same time provided us with new challenges. Once upon a time, in 1965 before you were born, when Singapore was separated from Malaysia, we had to build two new airlines from the old Malaya Airline so one of them became Malaysia’s national air carrier and the other became Singapore Airlines. At that point in time, how far do you think planes could fly unrefueled? 200 miles? 400 miles? If you google, what was very clear at that point in time was that commercial planes did not fly very far. This was why, at the point in time when they separated the air rights between Singapore and Malaysia, Malaysia chose all the domestic flights. Singapore was given all the long haul flights because at that point in time, long haul flights were unknown, unimaginable. Not many people thought that long haul flights would be able to make a living or business so Singapore got all the long haul flights. And of course, the history of Singapore Airlines did not start off as glorious as what it is now. In fact, Singapore Airlines struggled in its initial years but lo and behold, technology improved and technology changed. And suddenly long haul flights became cheaper, more comfortable and so forth. When I first went to Cambridge University to study, it was already not too bad, I could take a flight and change over at a stop-over in Saudi Arabia. In the middle of the night, the plane stopped in the desert to refuel before it flew onwards to London. That was a great achievement in the 1980s.

Today, from Changi Airport, you can fly to any part of the world on a commercial plane non-stop. And suddenly, because of the long haul flights with technology improving so fast, Singapore Changi Airport has become an international hub so we should feel justifiably proud of ourselves. However, technology has not stopped there. Will Changi Airport continue to be the international hub for global aviation?

Today, you are able to take a long haul flight from Australia to the European countries, and that itself is a new challenge for Singapore Changi Airport because now our airport can be bypassed. If anything, Dubai in the Middle East has become a natural hub because within six hours from Dubai, you can reach a great proportion of the entire world with human beings around.

So technology has enabled us to earn a living for many years but technology is now challenging us to come up with new technological solutions to continue to entrench our relevance to the world. And this is where you come in – you are the future scientists and future engineers. Whether Singapore can continue to entrench our position as a global node will depend on your effort of what you can come up with, what you invent, what you can innovate and so forth. If you can bring in another generation of technology that will entrench Singapore’s relevance to the world, then we will be able to confidently go towards SG100 without fear.

The second challenge that I am going to pose to you is this. How many of you have been stuck in a traffic jam in the last week? How many of you feel that the buses and trains are very crowded? If you feel so, then I give you a challenge; you see those little things flying around? What is the payload of the flying machine that I saw earlier? A few hundred grams? One day, can you invent and build a machine that can carry one hundred kilograms? Do you think that is possible? Of course, today we have machines that can carry a payload of one hundred kilograms but the challenge is can you build it at a price that is affordable to the average family? Because if you can build a machine for, say less than a thousand dollars, that can carry a hundred kilogram payload, tomorrow we will be able to get rid of all traffic jams and crowded trains in Singapore. Because if you can build that tomorrow, many of us, if not all of us, will be zipping around in Singapore. And if any country can do that as an experiment, it will be Singapore because we need this most compared to the other countries, because we are so dense.

So my challenge to all of you sitting here today is to have a dream – give yourself a price tag of a thousand dollars to build a machine that can take off and  land a payload of one hundred kilograms safely. That will be our dream for tomorrow because fifty years ago nobody imagined that Singapore would have an airport like what we have today. Fifty years ago, nobody imagined that we could build things that fly around based on the little joystick that you have in your hands. Fifty years later, you may exactly have a personal flying machine. If you come across that idea and you can build it tomorrow, not only will you become a millionaire, you will help Singapore transcend into the next lap of our transport history.

So on that note, I throw you that challenge and I wish you all the very best. Most importantly, in order to have great ideas and do great things, you must enjoy what you are doing. If you do not enjoy what you are doing, you are not having fun building those machines then we will not have those great ideas. So I am very impressed with all the ideas that we have seen today, and I am sure every year as I come back to this competition, I see better and more creative ideas. So on that note, I wish you the very best. May you be the next Singaporean that will build the personalised flying machine that can lift and land a hundred kilograms payload safely with less than a thousand Singapore dollars. 

Thank you very much.