Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) Boeing 777-240(ER) (33775/467) AP-BGJ arrives at London-Heathrow (LHR/EGLL) on March 7, 2011.
(Photo by James Mepsted)
It was a scene out of a cinema farce. Pakistan International Airlines Flight PK-370 was scheduled to take off from Karachi to Islamabad early one evening in September, but it had been delayed for two hours — a mechanical problem, the crew claimed.
Then a crew member confessed: The plane was waiting for a V.I.P. passenger. When a senator from the opposition Pakistan People’s Party, former Interior Minister Rehman Malik, finally showed up to board the flight, passengers mutinied and booed him away from the plane’s door. As if to keep things even, Ramesh Kumar Vankwani, a National Assembly member from Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s governing party, showed up even later, reached his seat, and was then chased off the plane by the passengers.
A video of the episode went viral on social media the next day, and many Pakistanis applauded the vigilante justice against V.I.P.s who use their status to lord it over ordinary citizens.
At the same time, the episode pointed to the malaise that has overtaken P.I.A., once a national asset whose crack pilots and sound management helped establish dozens of international routes. The state-owned airline is now all but lost in a morass of financial liability, political favoritism and technical disrepute. The pressing question: whether P.I.A. has passed the point of no return and can no longer be saved.
Flight PK-370 wasn’t an anomaly; horror stories abound of flights delayed for up to 30 hours before being canceled, and of furious passengers being sent home with no explanation. Computer systems cancel bookings without informing passengers, and with no opportunity for reimbursement. Planes fly dirty, flight attendants are lackadaisical and reservation agents are unreasonable. Yet P.I.A. still commands 70 percent of the domestic market in Pakistan, overshadowing three smaller and less well-equipped commercial airlines.
It wasn’t always this way. P.I.A. began flying internationally in 1955 as the country’s government-run carrier and received early technical assistance from Pan American World Airways. It quickly became a regional leader — the first Asia-based airline to operate jets, in 1960 — and it helped Singapore Airlines, Emirates and Royal Jordanian Airlines, among others, to establish their own fleets. In the 1960s, Pierre Cardin designed its flight attendants’ uniforms, while travel posters showcased exciting destinations and the romance of international travel.
P.I.A. showed profits back then, and being nationally subsidized, it could promise job security for all employees. But the future was slowly being compromised. Ticket prices were artificially low, the airline paid high taxes on jet fuel, and its flights were not allowed to sell alcohol. Then, in the 1990s, the first Gulf War drove fuel prices and insurance rates sky-high. Subsequent tensions with India and the war against the Taliban led to repeated closures of Pakistani airspace and airports.
But not all of the airline’s problems can be laid at war’s doorstep. One of the largest is overemployment: With only 36 planes and about 17,000 employees (who fly free with their families), the airline has a ratio of employees to aircraft that is reportedly among the highest in the world.
This is not a managerial strategy: It is a result of the government’s using P.I.A. as an employment reservoir. Plum jobs go to well-connected people, reflecting a larger governmental ethos of nepotism, favoritism and corruption.
Meanwhile, poor maintenance has rendered some P.I.A. planes inoperable, limiting the number of routes P.I.A. can fly. In September, according to the newspaper Dawn, 10 of the airline’s 36 aircraft were grounded for lack of spare parts. Departures have been scaled back or eliminated on unprofitable routes.
These factors allowed officials to report that P.I.A.'s annual loss — about $310 million last year — is estimated to be about $175 million this year. But those numbers indicate that the airline remains a huge drain on the national exchequer.
In response, the government is trying to privatize the carrier. In 2013, Prime Minister Sharif announced plans to sell a 26 percent stake in the airline, but the plan only angered many of the well-connected who now get special privileges.
More recently, Reuters reported a plan to split P.I.A. in two, divesting the airline of an investments division that owns the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan and the Hotel Scribe in Paris while offering to sell the airline itself to another global airline. Emirates (which P.I.A. helped to create), Etihad and Qatar are reportedly among the contenders.
Mohammad Zubair, a financial adviser to the government, hopes that a sell-off of the subsidiary’s assets will raise $4 billion, which might allow the government to retain and reinvigorate the airline.
Since this tactic too may fail, Mr. Sharif recently appointed a prominent businessman, Nasser Jaffer, as the P.I.A. chairman, and Capt. Shujaat Azeem, a pilot and businessman, to be the prime minister’s special assistant on aviation.
Captain Azeem told The Daily Telegraph that they intend to streamline operations, improve service and end corruption. But even if that can be achieved — and substantial doubt remains about that — it’s unlikely to be the end of the story.
On Flight PK-370, passengers had finally tired of the politicians who treat the national carrier like their personal transportation service. But Arjumand Azhar Hussain, who captured the onboard protest on video, was fired from his job at an international courier company less than a month later — an act widely believed to be a bit of revenge from somewhere in the V.I.P. culture, while the company defended it as “based on merit.”
Unless Mr. Jaffer and Captain Azeem turn out to be powerful enough to fix the part of P.I.A.'s culture that panders to the political elite, the airline will continue to sabotage its own recovery, and perhaps will have to change its name to one of the notorious acronyms that its frustrated passengers have been inventing for many years now: “Pakistan’s Irritating Airline.” Or “Prayers in the Air.” Or, most ominously, “Perhaps I Arrive.”
(Bina Shah - The New York Times)
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