ISLAMABAD: Prime Minis­ter Imran Khan on Friday orde­red expeditious reform of the Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) to pull the national flag carrier out of the tailspin.

“Revitalising national institutions like PIA would require both administrative restructuring and transparent utilisation of the available resources,” Khan said, while chairing a meeting on the affairs of the airline.

He called for pursuing a comprehensive reform strategy and undertaking the planned changes on priority basis.

The loss-making national carrier has struggled to come out of crisis for decades despite induction of new planes and various changes introduced from time to time.

Aviation experts believe that the poor state of affairs at the airline have been because of poor management, bad service and loss of business to Gulf airlines because of the country’s liberal open sky policy. Entry of far-eastern carriers including Chinese airlines after the start of CPEC caused more business losses for it.

Officials propose review of National Aviation Policy

Unending crises have, meanwhile, diminished employees’ motivation level.

Last month’s crash of a PIA aircraft while landing at Karachi exposed its deteriorating flight safety standards and badly damaged its reputation.

PIA’s balance sheet is currently showing accumulated losses of Rs434 billion, while its total liabilities, excluding loans, have grown to Rs247 billion against assets of Rs103 billion.

Restructuring the airline has been on PTI government’s agenda ever since it came to power in 2018. One of the first steps taken by the current government in this regard was appointment of Air Vice Marshal Arshad Malik as CEO of the airline in 2018.

The prime minister was told by the airline officials that number of improvements were achieved last year, including a 46 per cent growth in passenger revenue, 11pc increase in freight revenue, 43pc raise in income from the engineering department and improvement in earnings from UN charter flights. They further claimed to have substantively cut expenditures.

The officials, at the meeting, argued that stage was now set for “long term course correction”, but cautioned that “complex” and “deep organisation-wide transformational restructuring was needed” for that. They proposed a review of National Aviation Policy 2015 and preparation and implementation of a five-year strategic business plan.

Frequent changes in top management, political interference, inadequate financial support from the government and over-staffing in ‘non-core’ areas were flagged as other problematic areas.

Khan said putting the state-owned organisations back on track was one of the priorities of his government because their losses had to be ultimately borne by the taxpayers. “It is, therefore, important to expedite the reform process,” he emphasised.

The government has begun rolling out a reforms plan for the state-owned enterprises. Restructuring of railways was approved last week.

Published in Dawn, June 20th, 2020