PIA: a skeletal ghost of its storied past

PIA used to be a first-rate airline & people who ran it were great; now it is a skeletal ghost of its storied past

“PIA will soon regain its old glory.” — Sher Afghan Khan Niazi, Managing Director, on July 3, 2000.

“PIA to embark on a 10-year plan to reinvigorate itself.” — Chaudhry Ahmad Saeed, Managing Director, Dawn, January 6, 2003. “We look forward to your continuous support and loyalty in our mission to rejuvenate the overall brand image of PIA in order to relive the glory days.” — Syed Muhammad Ali Gardezi, Chairman, in Humsafar, PIA’s in-flight magazine, Winter 2015.

It was only after travelling recently from Toronto to Islamabad on PIA that I have finally decided to kiss the national flag-carrier goodbye. My decision was made not only because of the pedestrian cabin service and the unfriendliness of the cabin crew, but also because of PIA’s demeaning and condescending attitude towards the very people who help it stay in business and pay its salaries. There’s more: the entertainment system did not work for the duration of the flight, my business class seat was stuck in one position, and the silverware was a mix of plastic and metal. The only saving grace was the food.

For over 40 years, I chose PIA over more convenient (and cheaper, and better!) choices because I felt at home on my national airline. It served Pakistani food, played strains of Pakistani music and provided one the opportunity to talk to fellow passengers in native languages. I also chose it because of my unabashed love for the country of my origin (I have a life-long habit of saying ‘Zindabad’ whenever someone says ‘Pakistan’ out loud). Over the years, however, I realised that such feelings were one-sided when it comes to PIA. From check-in to boarding to in-flight service to landing, it seemed that I had become an inconvenience for the staff. Instead of appreciating my patronage, it acted as if it was doing me a favour by allowing me to fly with them.

PIA reminds me of the irrepressible Shaukat Thanvi’s delightful essay “Sodeshi Rail”, a timeless piece of Urdu humour that he wrote before the independence of India and some 65 years later, it still remains very topical, very pertinent and very funny. The essay was written in the backdrop of demands for independence from British rule. As the story goes, Thanvi falls asleep in his easy chair with slogans of ‘Azaadi’ and ‘Sooraj’ ringing in his ears and dreams of being at a railway station in an independent India. What follows, in Thanvi’s biting prose, is how the trains were being run after independence and there are uncanny similarities between the ‘great people’ who fly our national airline and the hapless and fumbling workers who ran the rails in Thanvi’s dream. “Sodeshi (desi or native) Rail” and PIA share common bonds: poor attitudes, blatant laziness, lying to the public, widespread inefficiency and gross nepotism.

In the essay, the man in the ticket window tries to sell a passenger a ticket at twice the regular price. After much haggling, he agrees to sell it at less than half the price but instead of issuing a regular ticket, he hands over a slip of paper scribbled with an illegible signature. The distinction between various train classes are cast aside and passengers are free to travel in any compartment as long as they have the blessings of the staff. However, the train sits stationary on the tracks for hours and no one knows what is happening: the train and station staff is nowhere to be seen. The driver, we later learn, had cycled off to the bazaar to buy a few buckets of coal to fuel the engine. Sound familiar? You haggle over the price of a ticket with the PIA agent, who wants to scalp you while getting deep wholesale commissions from the airline; your confirmed reservations are as good as a discontinued junk bond; and it is not unusual to have someone else get your confirmed seat with the airline computer showing no trace of your booking. If the flight is delayed, no one seems to know or care to tell the passengers the reason for the delay as if it were a state secret.

There’s much more. A few years ago, our reserved (and confirmed!) seats on the return flight to the US were mysteriously cancelled. After facing deafening silence from the Peshawar office, and because we simply had to take that particular flight, I decided to fly to Karachi to sort out the mess at PIA’s head office. When I presented our confirmed bookings, I was asked if I also had a separate reservation certificate issued by PIA in New York. When I pleaded ignorance of even the existence of such a document or procedure, I was advised that the next time around I must get a certificate duly signed and stamped confirming my passage. As the Americans say, go figure! Anyway, I refused to leave the head office until we got seats on the flight. The booking agent worked on his computer for a time, and then leaned over his desk and told me in a conspiratorial whisper, so typical of paper-pushers in Pakistan, that as a special favour he would accommodate me and my family in the economy class and that we would get our first class seats after the first stop in Cairo. We never got the promised seats, not in Cairo nor at the next stop, Paris. Neither was a refund made for the difference between the fare of our first class tickets and the economy class my family and I ended up traveling in.

But back to “Sodeshi Rail”. Thanvi wakes up and realises it was only a dream and that the trains were still running efficiently. In the case of PIA, there is no waking up from the nightmare because despite the boastful statements from the various heads of PIA, all of them have, wittingly or unwittingly, run the carrier into the ground.

PIA used to be a first-rate airline and the people who ran it were indeed great; now it is a skeletal ghost of its storied past and it is time to privatise it and get this dinosaur off the backs of the Pakistani taxpayer.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 3^rd,  2015.

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