I met with the CEO of PIA on my recent trip to Pakistan and he talked about how he was going to fix the airline.
The credibility of the pilots, return to PIA profitability, and the EU blacklist were some of the issues we discussed.
PIA's fleet strategy and consolidation of European operations were discussed with PIA Chief Commercial Officer Ali Qasim.
There is a video
PIA CEO Air Marshall Arshad Malik was interviewed.
PIA has a wonderful past.
The political intervention happening in this organization has been going on for two decades. Over a period of time, there were people who were stronger than the organization. They were trying to control the organizations when the people started merging in associations and unions.
We had lost merit-oriented decisions because of these interventions. We weren't taking commercial-based decisions. We were being told what to do. Your performance indicators started to go down once all these things were happening.
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PIA CEO Air Marshall Arshad Malik.
My first year was 2019. We were able to groom ourselves into commercial aviation despite all the challenges. Through the help of my team, we were able to produce good results. We probably came into operating profit after 10 or 12 years.
The "Fake" License Challenge involves evidence and a pilot.
The next challenge was documented. The aviation and hospitality industries were the worst.
The Civil Aviation Authority of Pakistan was one of the challenges that came as we were passing through COVID. The licenses that were being issued were suspected. I think this was the worst challenge because my European routes were blocked. My codeshare and Interline agreements were at stake.
I told myself we have to manage it. We have to face it with reality and come out of this crisis. All the pilots who were being suspected were grounded. We challenged the names and data of the central cell formed under my supervision.
We were able to prove that not all PIA pilots have the suspicious license. It was a small group of people. I proved that PIA is not at fault. The regulatory authority has to resolve matters and bring them up to better standards.
Are you going back to Europe?
I got an Air Vice Marshall to look after the safety aspect after we sorted out our in-house affairs. The international auditors came after we presented ourselves to Pakistan Civil Aviation.
We were fortunate that my team was able to clear the hurdle. IOSA gave us outstanding remarks. The ICAO Audit has also been done recently. We are very, very positive despite not having formal information. I think the ban should be lifted by the first quarter of next year.
Future fleet strategy.
We want to have a fleet that is standardized so that we can save money. We have about 10 A320s and we plan to induct 6 more A320s in 2022, and then every year for the next five years we will induct more A320s. Those that are not owned by us will be phased out by 2024. We'll be introducing state-of-the-art wide-body airplanes such as A330/A350 or B777/B787. We will make sure that the fleet is of two types, one narrow body and one wide body, for economies of scale.
Route rationalization and cost cutting.
In the aviation industry, the yields have always been a challenge, so we have learned to be very quick with the cost. The yields in the aviation industry have been dropping and the cost has been increasing.
We decided to consolidate our network rather than expand on the route where we used to have one flight or two flights a week, because we went into a very strict route diagnostic labs where we diagnosed each and every route.
In Europe, we used to have a lot of destinations where a single destination was not able to cater to wide-body aircraft, for example, Oslo and Copenhagen, which are not very big markets for us. We need to combine both of them. We need to combine them in Milan and Barcelona. When you combine destinations and sectors, the cycle cost is enormous. The route's profitability goes off.
The center of Europe is the point we have decided to focus on, because it is a very convenient connection to the rest of Europe. The Paris market has better yields than the other. European destinations. There is a large community of people from Pakistan.
We will be having a codeshare, commercial partnership, and SPA with other airlines from Paris so that we can provide passengers easy access to the rest of Europe.
The full interview can be seen in the video.
Pakistan is the Large Sleeping Giant in Aviation.
One of the last Civilian departures out of Kabul was called "Make Your Own Decision".
