Great people to fly with

There are two kinds of air sickness in the world. Most of the world's people know only one kind. That is the one caused by the nausea of flying, producing a certain bit of lightness in the tummy, related to gravity and physics. There is another, more malignant type of air sickness too. This second type is known only to those unfortunate human beings that have ever had to fly with PIA. It is the feeling of being sick of fighting against the impenetrable multiple layers of PIA and its people's incompetence and incontinence. Over a dozen PIA customers in Karachi had the joy of experiencing just this kind of air sickness this weekend, as they attempted to check-in on their confirmed tickets for their confirmed and on-time 10 am flight to Sukkur on PK 390.

Their attempts were rejected by the PIA system, through a wonderful new mechanism called "denied", in which passengers are denied their economic right to check-in to a flight with no explanation, no apology and no kind of compensation for missing a flight that they were on-time for, for which their documents were in order, and which they would never have missed on any other airline in the world. After being told several stories by PIA staff, including one over-the-top account of how a cancelled flight to Rahim Yar Khan had caused an overbooking of the flight to Sukkur, PIA's customers overheard an explanation that was all too predictable. A group of Sukkur MNAs and their entourage had been accommodated at their expense.

Luckily, because PIA is a state-owned enterprise whose primary role is to provide fast and easy access to the friendly skies for Pakistan's ever growing cache of VIPs, the airline is fair game in the press. If this was a private enterprise, not only would PIA flights be on time, but its pilots would have to take breathalyzer tests before flying, its air hostesses would do justice to the breathtaking pulchritude of Pakistani women, and you would never be "denied" a boarding card because the very parliamentarians elected to represent and protect you, were given your seats.

PIA is of course not a private enterprise - and seems to exist primarily to provide gainful employment to thousands of utterly incompetent political sycophants. The PIA sycophant got his job because of a political party, which is why Pakistan's glorious heroes of democracy always come first. Customer scorn and contempt for irrationality is no good at the airport. The customer is the irrational one for expecting to be given the service she pays for. You see, the PIA sycophant got his job in spite of the customer (not because of her). That is why, at PIA, the customer always come last.

The PIA customer however should be armed with a little more than the pathetic helplessness that is writ large across faces, white and brown, Pakistani and foreign, pretty and pretty ugly, at every airport where PIA practises its trade. The PIA customer should be armed with knowledge.

Let's begin with some numbers. The airline lost Rs4.4 billion in 2005, Rs12.8 billion in 2006 and Rs13.6 billion in 2007. That is a lot of money, but the whopper with extra cheese was delivered in 2008. More than Rs38.5 billion worth of losses last year means that PIA is officially the kind of massive failure that makes Pakistan's FATA strategy and RBS's purchase of ABN Amro look like roaring success stories. Even in 2009 rupees, PIA's 2008 losses come to almost $500 million. Half a billion dollars. Ouch.

That might be too large a number to remember. There are of course ways to bring that into perspective. According to its 2007 Annual Report, PIA has 18,231 employees. That means that each employee at PIA lost more than $27,425, or roughly Rs2,166,575. That is roughly the price of a fully loaded top of the line 2009 Honda Civic, or a nice plot of land in Islamabad's newly emerging areas.

The tragedy of course is that the per employee revenue at PIA in 2007 was almost Rs4 million. The fact that the per employee loss is in excess of Rs2 million means that on average not only does PIA burn right through everything that it earns, but it then proceeds to burn through an additional load of cash that is worth half of everything PIA earns as well. Whose cash is it? PIA will protest that the government subsidies it receives are only loan guarantees. Well who guarantees those loans? The Pakistani taxpayer of course. Invariably, most of PIA's unwitting customers are the same taxpayers who pray for miracles in the Islamic Republic (but always forget to vote). The joke is on them. They are subsidizing PIA, then buying its tickets and then being denied boarding those flights; this is the real miracle.

At 434 employees per aircraft, PIA is a world-beater. No major airline boasts that kind of ratio. At 276 per aircraft, Indians are embarrassed to be associated with Indian Airlines, while in the United States, United Airlines has the highest employee to aircraft ratio in America at under 120 per plane.

Next time you, the PIA customer, see a PIA employee sitting around doing nothing (an increasingly common sight as democracy continues to take its revenge), you should know that for each employee, you are paying the nearly twenty lakh rupees that it costs to keep them there, twiddling their thumbs, and putting up posters of the Shaheed Mohtarma. There has rarely been such a brazen abuse of an image, as there has been of Benazir Bhutto's, may God rest her soul in peace.

There's more however. PIA's incompetence is manifest everywhere you cast the innocent eye. Here is what the PIA website says about the current MD, Captain Mohammad Aijaz It says: "Haroon hails from the famous Memon community known for its business acumen in Pakistan." Not only is the statement the kind of stereotype that should never find its way on a government website, it is also possibly damaging to the Memon reputation. We can be quite certain that any community known for its business acumen would rather not be associated with the business of PIA. Of course, if the MD has no qualifications to be MD other than the fact that he is a pilot who was born to a Memon family, one understands entirely the need to include that bit of information.

How is the government dealing with PIA's myriad challenges? A good share of the almost 8,000 jiyalas that are being reinstated by the government to positions that were terminated in 1996 are going to come back to PIA. These fine young officers will be a real feather in Pakistan's cap, representing as they do, merit, and some righteous hard work. It is a wonder that they weren't picked up and plucked away to Dubai by Emirates, or to London, by British Airways.

Just remember, the next time you see an idle PIA employee, he is worth more to you than you realize. You help pay the more than two million rupees in losses that employee generates. His presence enables PIA to maintain a world-beating employee to aircraft ratio. He helps bump you off flights so that politicians can fight for democracy in every destination that PIA flies to. The PIA employee puts the people, in the people's airline. Long live the people.



The writer is an independent political economist. www.mosharrafzaidi .com