KARACHI, Oct 24: PIA will start a direct flight to Chicago from next summer as part of its plan to attract new passengers, airlines officials told Dawn.

Chicago has a large Pakistani community which has been demanding a direct flight to the city for sometime. Members of the Pakistani community complain that as the PIA flight comes only to New York, those living in Chicago have to wait at the JFK Airport for four to five hours to catch a connecting flight. This often forces them to take other airlines.

A direct flight, they say, would not only save them from this trouble but would also encourage them to fly PIA.

In the late 1980s, PIA extended its New York flights to Chicago but it was later abandoned.

The community complains that extending the New York flight did not solve its problem as it failed to shorten the flight time.

“Now we plan to fly directly to Chicago from a destination in Europe, probably Manchester or Birmingham,” said PIA’s Chief Operating Officer Khurshid Anwar.

The airlines also plans to upgrade its service to New York and Toronto by 2003.

Khurshid Anwar said at present the airlines sent 190-seater planes to the two cities but in two years it planned to replace them with 310-seaters.

“We are also considering proposals for extending our service to Houston and Los Angeles,” he said.

PIA, he said, also intended to revive its old routes to Mashhad, Tehran, Istanbul and Nairobi.

To reach these new destinations and improve its existing commitments, the airlines plans to buy eight new Boeing aircraft at a cost of $1.6 billion.

A team from the Export-Import Bank of the United States will be visiting Pakistan next week for finalizing part of the deal. Later next month, a PIA team will also be visiting Washington for more talks.

The Ex-Im Bank is financing three of the eight aircraft PIA plans to buy from Boeing.

“We are applying for 85 per cent of the total project cost of $380 million,” said Khurshid Anwar.

He said that PIA had abandoned a proposal to buy used aircraft from the United Airlines because they did not meet its requirement.

The airlines, he said, was looking for engines that could fly non-stop for 13 to 14 hours as it planed to introduce direct flights to the United States.

The planes offered by the United Airlines were short by three hours, he added.

Besides the eight Boeing, PIA also intends to buy smaller aircraft for domestic use. PIA already has 45 aircraft and employees more than 17,000 people.

Last year, the airlines suffered a loss of Rs2.3 billion but the new management, which took over in April last year, is trying to make it profitable.

During the last six months of the last year, PIA made a profit of Rs400 million which rose to Rs1.4 billion during the first six months of this year.