- Second incident in a month shows something is not right
It was more or less a replay, and showed that PIA is not doing as well as it should. The main change was the place. In the first incident, at Manchester at the beginning of the month, a passenger had activated the emergency door slide, resulting in the offloading of three dozen passengers and a delay of seven hours in the flight. In the next, the plane was parked at Beijing Airport, in the middle of a Tokyo-Beijing-Islamabad flight, about to head home, when the inflight meal was being loaded, when the incident occurred, causing 50 passengers to be offloaded and a delay of three hours. On both occasions, a Boeing 777 was involved.
The root cause of both incidents was the cabin crews’ lack of familiarity with the new plane. That in turn indicates that the poor quality of the training. However, no matter how good the training, it will have little or no effect if the person trained is not receptive. Normally, airline employees are receptive to training because they fear for their jobs. But PIA employees know that their unions will protect them. If not, they would have a fallback in their original patrons who had them recruited. The tragedy of PIA has been that, it has been regarded as a source of jobs for each consecutive generation of friends and family of those who have been employed for decades. The result is not just that the airline has failed to attract the best possible recruits, but also that those who have joined have powerful patrons. It is because of this, incidentally, that the unions so strongly and successfully resisted privatisation. One of the consequences of privatisation would have been that the new management would have cut back on the overstaffing that afflicts the airline.
The airline, under the new CEO, Air Marshal Arshad Malik, had reached break-even operationally by the third quarter of the current fiscal year, but profitability was three or four years in the future. While the bottom line is important, the safety of an airline is also. But both depend on the quality of manpower. That is an aspect that the CEO should be working on, unless he wishes to live with more incidents like those at Manchester and Beijing.