Saud Faisal
They say success does not come over night. This is a commonly preached principle around the world and when we look at success stories from various points in history we realize that it is true. Unfortunately, in our country Pakistan the expectations are quite the opposite, we want results yesterday while leaving hardwork for tomorrow. The major ramification of this is that many efforts which have the potential to bear fruit are shot down simply because people here just don’t want to wait. Whether it is fixing a troubled economy or turning around the national airline ‘PIA’, we want results and total turn around today, no matter if the neglect took decades to bring back to where it is now.
When we look at the latter, we see that PIA has accumulated over PKR 482 billion of losses over so many years. The airline continues to bleed and needs a major overhaul in so many areas before it can turn to profit again. Many of the hard decisions needed to fix the ailing company would show results only in the long run. Yet despite years of compiled problems, the stakeholders of this airline including the general public and key public interest safeguarding institutions (like the judiciary) want that the airline is fixed over night. This pressure is the sole reason why despite so many bail outs and other efforts, the airline is unable to change its fortunes.
You may ask how this pressure constrains the turnaround efforts. Well to gage this you simply need to see how small the shelf life of PIA Chief Executive Officers has been. Now PIA has always had the issue of short lived managements throughout its history since 1955 till 2015, the average life of the Chairman and/or Managing Director had been just over three years. Air Marshal Nur Khan was the only head of PIA to have served the longest combined tenure and we do not need to recall how he PIA into its golden era. Things have only gotten worse since PIA has been converted in to a company in 2016 as the shelf life has decreased to an average of seven to eight months. The most recent casualty of this trend is Air Marshal Arshad Malik who had only taken over as the CEO a year or so ago.
Turnarounds do not happen overnight and if we look at examples of airline turnarounds, we learn that it takes years and years to change the fortunes of any airline. Idris Jala needed five years before he could turn around Malaysian Airlines. Emirsayah Sattar achieved the results of his Quantum Leap strategy for Garuda Indonesia after serving the airline for over nine years. Tewolde Gebremariam, who has transformed Ethiopian Airlines as a giant in the aviation industry has been serving as the CEO since 2011. Emirates changed its CEO after 17 years while in Lufthansa the average tenure of the CEO is 9 years. These are all examples of government owned airlines (Garuda was state owned when Sattar was CEO) which have transformed in to profitable entities because their managements were allowed to operate with consistency and longevity. Even successful airlines like Qatar, Etihad and Delta stand where they are today because the individuals running them have been in the key position for years.
The same needs to happen in PIA because the airline has only suffered because of frequent fresh starts. Every new regime comes with a new vision and at times completely discredits its predecessors. Only when there is consistency in policies and direction this airline will truly turn around its luck.
It’s sad affair on how things are shaping for the CEO PIA. Finally we had started getting some consistently good news coming out of PIA which shows that the Air Marshal knew what he was doing. From bringing back grounded planes to getting out of SECPs defaulters list, from news of starting New York to the increased in revenues and reduction in losses, we had all started getting a hope from PIA. How things would transpire from this point onwards can only be wishful speculation.
