Death warrant of Airline signed: Palpa

The Pakistan Airline Pilots' Association (Palpa) has termed the latest MoU between PIA and Turkish Airlines to terminate the national airline operations in Istanbul a death warrant for the national carrier, as the management's recent secret step will eventually make an international airline a domestic airline.
Criticising the PIA's management on signing a loss-making deal with Turkish Airline, the President of Palpa, Sohail Baluch, said the termination of flight operations in Turkey will not only minimise the revenues of the airline but will cut down its size to a meagre regional domestic carrier. He said that instead of finding new routes and destinations to expand the network, the airline's inefficient management is bent upon destroying the national airline to make it the worst performing national institution and airline of the country.
He said that the Pakistanis mostly opt for national flag carrier for simple reasons of local native language speaking crew and direct flights to avoid hassle of changing planes at foreign destination and with this step the management has added more spice to its recipe of complete disaster.
Suhail Baluch, criticising the management's unwise marketing policy to convert an international airline into a regional, while giving its international business to other airline, said that now all employees of PIA will be working to earn profits for another airline, while its own shareholders are waiting for years to earn profit from their investments.
He said that the new fleet of Boeing 777 is technologically the latest fleet but is only good for long haul flights such as cross-Atlantic routes which through this agreement PIA will give to another carrier. Suhail Baluch said that the PIA management fails to understand that long routes are major revenue earners while after this agreement it will be left with loss making domestic and regional flights.
He said that instead of finding ways to recover the losses of over 70 billion (rupees) the airline has made in last few years, the management is surrendering the profit making routes while keep operating the regional and domestic routes which contribute heavily to the annual losses of the airline.-PR