THE impression given in AVM (r) Abdus Sattar Toor’s letter (Feb 9) seems to be that Air Marshals worked wonders for PIA and the Civil Aviation Authority. A retired air marshal is, in fact, likely to be as unfamiliar with running an airline as an airline head would be running the air force.

Everyone is not Noor Khan, who had the ability to raise to the pinnacle anything he touched: PAF or PIA.

The retired AVM wants to ‘set the record straight’. Well! The ‘country’ went dry in the days of Z.A. Bhutto; but the ‘airline’ did not. Pakistani workers and our pilgrims to the Middle East still travelled PIA. The airline was making money. Then came the ‘brain wave’, the ‘open skies’ policy.

AVM Toor absolves the CAA of the ‘open skies’ policy because it was introduced by the democratically-elected PML-N government. In fact, the government and the CAA are always on the same page. It was ‘open skies’ then, it is ‘privatisation’ today.

The AVM rightly says: “There was hardly a competitor in the region” those days. But petro-dollars began flowing in. Middle Eastern airlines hired the best managements in the world. They also provided liberal services to their passengers. PIA, on the other hand, not only did not have petro-dollars but had to live with very restrictive policies. They were competing with one hand tied behind their backs.

The question is, when the odds were totally against us why did we volunteer to compete and open our skies? This, in fact, became the cause of our destruction.

All is not lost yet. We can gradually begin to withdraw the ‘open skies’ policy and start giving our passengers the service that almost all Muslim country airlines provide on their international sectors. Our battle with corruption, nepotism, overstaffing, etc, can continue.

Who can argue with the AVM’s suggestion: “PIA needs corporate restructuring and a dynamic leader with a free hand to choose the best professionals”--- professionals without vested business interests, of course.

Capt S. Afaq Rizvi

Karachi

Published in Dawn, February 13th, 2016