Too great to fly with

Within days of the launch of Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) Premier service to London, the spokesperson of the air carrier went on social media to condemn the passengers who had used the service.

PIA spokesperson Daniyal Gilani took to Twitter to post pictures of PK-785 on its arrival in London. “This is how our new A-330 looked like on arrival in London yesterday. Litter. Lotions stolen. Passengers please take care of PIA premier,” he wrote.

Responding to questions regarding the situation, Gilani wrote, “No passenger is allowed to damage public property,” adding that other airlines “ban” such passengers.

One can wonder how any airline can ban a passenger for stealing lotions or littering. Obviously the PIA official has not seen the state of other carriers after long-haul flights. The real issue with PIA premier is not the state of the aircraft when it lands but of the service itself.

There was a time when PIA’s cabin crew would clean toilets and collect passenger litter, as is the practice in other airlines, while treating their clients with courtesy. But political interference in recruitment has eroded its human resources.

Merely changing the designs of uniforms or seat configuration will not necessarily achieve more revenue, but will most likely only raise operating costs, diluting profits and increasing losses. PIA has started the premier service in haste without evaluating the economics of fare structure and extra frills. This week, our paper reported that PIA recruited another 100 employees to serve passengers on premier flights that would start on more routes in the near future.

The newly-hired employees will serve as cabin crew on the A330-300 aircraft, which PIA acquired from Sri Lankan Airlines on wet lease for the flights in July. As per the agreement, the national carrier would acquire two more A330-300s from SriLankan Airlines by February 2017.

The PIA Training Centre will start a 12-week Cabin Crew Basic Training programme for them. All well and good. Except the national airline has one of the highest employee to aircraft ratios in the world as it is.

When asked about overstaffing issues in the advent of further recruitment, an official said that “this is a highly politicised matter.” The official was quoted as saying that when PIA opted to transfer the surplus staff to other stations where services are needed, they disobeyed orders and went on strike. The issue is not with the PIA management. It is with the unions who derive their support from the political parties.

One may be reminded that at present, PIA employs around 18,000 people and the airline reported a net loss of Rs20.55 billion for the nine-month ended September 30, 2015.

According to a columnist in our paper, Malik Tariq Ali, for the national carrier PIA, the exuberance and fanfare surrounding the launching of a ‘premier service’ from Islamabad to London on A330 aircraft leased from Sri Lankan Airlines (SLA) – which was forced to downsize its fleet because its own accumulated losses had peaked at $993 million – makes no sense.

Tariq Ali argues that in commercial aviation, profits can be earned only if fleet replacement, aircraft configuration and route structures are dictated by marketing demands and passenger profiles, not by whims of the government. According to press reports, SLA was paying $450,000 per month as installment for each A330 which comes to $15,000 per day. PIA is paying approximately $8,000 per hour as lease charges, which for the 17-hour return Islamabad-London-Islamabad flight comes to $136,000.

PIA cannot rise from the ashes based on such gimmicks. One has to understand how the airline has suffered under political mismanagement. Under former chairman N Jaffer and aviation adviser Shujaat Azeem, PIA’s losses rose from Rs226.8 billion as on December 31, 2014 to Rs247.4 billion by September 30, 2015 although in this period, PIA saved over 43 per cent on fuel bills. It is all well and good to bring in a foreign managing director. But if this airline continues to work in the way it does, very little will change for it in terms of profitability. The prime minister has delayed the privatisation of the airline. But his attempt to try and fix things has only resulted in more losses for PIA, which are borne by the taxpayer. How long can we delay the inevitable.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 29^th, 2016.

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