Zaffar Ahmed Khan, new CEO of PIA, has inherited an airline with liabilities far more than assets, a set of executives which are part of the team that has driven the airline into the red, a partial ban on over 30 aircraft operating in Europe and schedules that only add more to the Total Operating Cost and hence a resultant increase in mounting losses.
As if this is not enough, the CEO himself has no past experience in the intricacies and dynamics that commercial civil aviation offers in a fiercely competitive market, with rising duel costs.
PIA today faces a grave crisis, some of its own making, while the rest is undue political interference by Islamabad and political blackmailing by powerful local forces, which makes the whole commercial operation a totally unviable project. Islamabad has either to muster the political will to make tough decisions or to pay subsidies to the airline for the luxury of political exigencies, which contribute to upscaling the operating costs. The dead sectors involved in positioning flights, add to the costs on every route the PIA operates.
Almost over 76.9 % of PIA's west bound flights have passengers hailing from Azad Kashmir, Frontier, the Potohar Belt, Jhelum, Lahore, Gujrat, Faisalabad, and the South Punjab region, which makes the northern airports like Islamabad, Lahore and Peshawar more convenient to embark upon on a journey or port of arrival.
The same is the situation for high yield Middle East, Gulf and Far East flights. However, in spite of an average load factor of over 70%, the operating cost increases, when you add to it the cost incurred, with almost empty flights involved in positioning aircraft to Islamabad, Peshawar and Lahore from Karachi, for onward flights to various international destinations.
Mr Zaffar has to take tough decisions to cut costs, upscale yields and continue to operate on sectors with high-density traffic. If political exigencies do not allow such commercial decisions, then the federal government must be made to pay the costs incurred in dead sectors.
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