Leila Khan
For decades, Pakistan International Airlines carried a slogan that resonated beyond advertising: Great People to Fly With. It reflected a period when PIA’s pilots, engineers, and crew were respected across the aviation world, and when the airline itself symbolised competence and ambition. However, an airline survives not on people alone, but on systems, discipline, and financial reality. And for PIA, that reality eventually became impossible to ignore.
There was a time when PIA was not a problem to be explained but a benchmark to be admired. In the 1960s and 70s, it was Asia’s model carrier, profitable, disciplined, and technically respected. PIA helped launch Emirates, trained foreign crews, pioneered jet operations in the region, and built a reputation for professionalism recognised globally.
Unfortunately, over the decades, PIA turned from an airline into a political warehouse. Governments of every colour used it to absorb excess labour, reward loyalty, and postpone difficult decisions. Professional management gave way to political appointments. Commercial logic surrendered to administrative convenience. By the time losses became headline news, the damage was already structural.
At its worst, PIA’s employee-to-aircraft ratio ranked among the poorest in the industry, several times higher than that of efficient international carriers. No airline, regardless of history or patriotism, can survive when staffing decisions are divorced from operational need. Routes were flown for symbolism rather than sustainability. Procurement lacked transparency. Maintenance standards weakened. Decision-making slowed under layers of interference.
Perhaps the most damaging loss, however, was credibility.
Aviation runs on trust, from regulators, insurers, lessors, and passengers. Once PIA lost that trust, every problem compounded the next. Aircraft became harder and more expensive to lease. Insurance premiums rose. International scrutiny intensified. When safety concerns surfaced, they were no longer treated as isolated failures but as confirmation of institutional decay.
By the time reform became unavoidable, PIA was no longer a turnaround story. It became a liability structure.
Critics fixate on the headline valuation, arguing that a national asset was “sold cheap.” The argument is emotionally satisfying and economically misleading. No serious investor acquires an airline drowning in losses, burdened with debt, stripped of credibility, and encumbered by legacy obligations without first ring-fencing liabilities. It is elementary risk management.
Detaching PIA’s operational core from historic liabilities was the only way this transaction could have happened at all.
What critics also ignore is the most basic distinction between the state and a private investor: governments can afford to run losses indefinitely; private owners cannot. There are no subsidies, no bailouts, and no political cushions available. Losses have to be managed, or the business collapses. This leaves investors with only one option: to inject capital, impose discipline, and rebuild the airline as a commercially viable operation. Survival itself demands reform.
An airline is not land, buildings, or nostalgia. It is a cash-burning, compliance-heavy business that survives only if it flies profitably every day. Any buyer stepping in is not purchasing a ready-made success; they are inheriting a crisis that requires capital infusion, fleet rationalisation, staff restructuring, regulatory rehabilitation, and brand repair. None of this is optional. None of it is cheap.
This is precisely why the transaction, despite the noise, makes strategic sense.
Privatisation is not an escape from accountability; it is a transfer of risk. The government exists as an open-ended fiscal drain. The buyer absorbs operational and reputational exposure. If the airline succeeds, it will be because it was finally allowed to function as a business rather than a patronage platform. If it fails, the losses will no longer be socialised.a
PIA still has great people, which was never the issue. What failed was the structure that trapped them in a system unable to reward efficiency, enforce discipline, or stop losses. The choice Pakistan faced was not between pride and privatisation, but between realism and denial. The reset was never going to be comfortable, but it was unavoidable. Because no airline, no matter how capable its people or how storied its past, can continue flying against economic gravity.
The writer is a former State Minister for Education and Professional Training, former Member of the National Assembly of Pakistan, Chairperson of the Prime Minister’s Youth Programme and Director at Media Times.
