PIA seems to be in news for all the wrong reasons, in spite of billions of dollars pumped into it on sovereign guarantees. The prestigious UK - based Financial Times in its December 31, issue, while publishing events based on numbers, positive or negative for year 2012, highlighted PIA as an airline with the highest number of employees to aircraft ratio of the world. There was no positive mention of Pakistan in the magazine. According to the newspaper, PIA has 485 employees per aircraft, a figure based on its total strength of serviceable and unserviceable aircrafts and permanent employees on its payroll.
The unfortunate truth is that if the total number of employees, regular plus contract were tabulated and based on number of serviceable aircrafts, this figure would be between 595 and 650 per serviceable aircraft, while the industry average is under 200. Excess employees contribute to incompetence, inefficiency, pilferage, unethical unionism and deterioration apart from financial drain. In spite of surplus staff, PIA has further burdened itself with additional 3,500 employees of all categories in the past five years. PIA aircraft utilization is lowest in the region, which can be gauged from average utilization of its pilots which is below 37.8 hours per month, while they are paid a guaranteed 70 hours, with nominal tax, as compared to industry average of over 65 hours.
Yet in utter disregard of huge financial losses, this government handed over PIA to uneducated controversial cronies, who only caused further accumulation of losses now estimated to be over Rs145 billion. Instead of focusing on improving customer services and serviceability of its fleet, it is an airline hostage to employee’s welfare and corruption by cronies of sitting government, most of them semi literate, with hardly any professional qualifications required of competent executives. In past five years over 300 more pilots have been recruited, mostly in violation of merit, while those retired have been rehired on contract, in spite of under utilization of the existing regular serving pilots.
The marketing division should be headed by will qualified and experienced men of integrity of which there in no dearth in the airline. The retirement and promotion of fake degree and domicile holders should not come as a surprise in this setup. The ageing B 747 fleet which has been grounded thrice in the past five years and then revived, each time by spending millions of dollars, has an average utilization of only 23 hours per month. There is no one to ask why a money making organization is going into deep losses?
MIR TASSADAQ,
Lahore, January18.