Pending PIA sale

The caretaker government’s plans to privatise PIA have still not been derailed, which is a surprise for anyone that has followed previous attempts to sell off the once-shining airline. Today’s PIA regularly ranks among the worst airlines in the world for quality and service on the ground and in the air, and since nobody who has a choice is willing to pay to spend time with these ‘great people to fly with’, we, the taxpayers, have the ‘privilege’ of subsidising the managers and staff to the tune of Rs13 billion per month so that they can keep it operating at the same level, with no incentive to improve.

Oddly, Caretaker Information Minister Murtaza Solangi has claimed that the sale of the airline would not cause employees of the airline to lose their job. If no job losses is a condition for sale, we might as well accept that no buyers are about to come forward — one of the airline’s biggest problems for most of its history has been having the highest staff-to-aircraft ratios in the world, with redundancies galore due to political appointments, nepotism and general mismanagement.

PIA has about 11,000 staff right now and 37 planes, although only 22 are operational, and even these are approaching the end of their flying life. Add the fact that Caretaker Privatisation Minister Fawad Hassan Fawad has said as few as “10 to 12” planes are operational at any given time, the ratio would be anywhere from about 300 employees per plane to as high as 1,000 per plane. Top airlines usually have about 100-150 employees per plane; and overstaffed ones about 250. PIA’s number looks like a typo. But we are not so lucky. The overstaffing is very real, and without downsizing, the airline will be unsellable.

Overstaffing and the pensions issue — potential buyers would also not want to be saddled with the airline’s ballooning pension plan — must be tackled head-on and before any sale if the government wants to maximise our return on investment, or rather, minimise our decades of losses.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 14^th, 2023.

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