The Perils of PIA
Given the once-vaunted reputation of PIA, very few analysts are now either objective or positive about the airline’s performance. An airline is supposed to take passengers and cargo from one location to another, in safety, comfort and on time. As a corporate entity it is also supposed to earn profits and for the most part, PIA performs reasonably well on both counts. Then why is it that PIA gets a lot of flak from travelling passengers, mostly Pakistani nationals since it is increasingly clear that foreigners prefer alternatives and unless it is a package, say for the Maldives or for connections to Bangkok or Dhaka, they take PIA as an airline of least preference, even when journeying to Pakistan?
As an illustration of the point, one would like to relate events of Thursday April 30, 1998 when I took PK-314 from Karachi to Lahore at 06:00 am on my way to Islamabad after a few hours stay at Lahore. When I reached Lahore Airport at 2:30 pm to embark upon PK-303 at 3:30 pm I was told that the flight had been delayed till 5:55 pm because the aircraft had left Lahore late for Bahawalpur at 12:00 noon. Since I had time at my hands I decided this was as good an opportunity to test the system, so I requested the concerned traffic staff to put me on any earlier flight. There was no other flight in-between except Aero-Asia and their flight at 5 pm had been cancelled. However PIA had PK-728, an international flight, landing at Lahore and continuing onto Islamabad at 4:50 pm. It was quite possible to accommodate the 30 passengers on that flight. It could be done I was told, if the District Manager could speak to the Station Manager, who in turn would get permission from the Customs and Immigration. So with some difficulty I got through to Mr Arif Khan, the District Manager, who at least spoke to me, though his tone suggested that anything lower than the PM and the Punjab CM was far below his status or attention level. In any case he did speak to the Station Manager, Mr Azeem Zafar, who in turn cheerfully told me that it was entirely his fault and that I should blame him since he could have acted earlier and didn’t. Now the Customs and Immigration authorities were not available as it was past their office hours. For good measure I rang up the Director Marketing PIA, Mr Haider Jalal, in Karachi but couldn’t get through to him, first because he was on a long overseas call and then had to sit in on a Promotion Board. When I explained to his staff the urgency of the matter, they conveniently passed the buck. I was put through to the Passenger Sales Manager Mr. Abid Jaffery, who told me, again quite cheerfully that I was wasting his and my time, that Mr Arif Khan in Lahore was the man to contact. During all this time, the attitude of the PIA ground staff at Lahore was excellent, they were courteous and hospitable to all the passengers. I was personally in no real hurry but there were passengers who were thus discomfited at the delay and the inability of PIA to improvise even when a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) should have been in place. This was a singular case of lack of decision-making. Both the District Manager and the Station Manager should have been concerned about the delay but it was quite obvious they were not pushed. There must be a system within PIA that caters for such delays but quite obviously it was not functioning and the decision-makers on the spot were not pushed. Could it have happened to another airline? Maybe, but in the circumstances, the lack of decision-making is endemic to PIA and as it goes higher up the management ranks, it gets worse. For the record, it is still far better than what it was a couple of years ago where all major decisions emanated from the former PM’s very decisive spouse and/or his hand-picked minions in PIA, mostly for personal profit or rank nepotism.
