I RECENTLY watched a short clip on social media in which only one passenger could be seen travelling in a PIA flight from Manchester to Islamabad with 17-member crew. There is no point in believing in everything one comes across on social media, yet this particular clip somehow did not surprise me because, as a Pakistani, I believe it can happen.

Once I had gone on Eid holidays to Pakistan. For return ticket confirmation, I visited the PIA office in Karachi’s Avenue Centre every alternate day and returned after simply being told that I was on ‘priority waiting list’.

One day, finally, I got the confirmation. It was a long haul flight with massive seating capacity, and in such a plane, we were only 18 passengers. So much for ‘priority waiting list’!

I cannot recall precisely, but it was perhaps the second half of the 1990s when PIA was operating two ‘half’ Karachi-Bahrain flights weekly. Don’t be surprised by the word ‘half’.

These were really ‘half’ flights. The shuttle flight used to start from Karachi, with half of its passengers headed for Doha, and the other half for Bahrain. In Doha, after the disembarkation of Doha-bound passengers, it used to take 50 per cent new passengers for Karachi on the seats vacated by the passengers disembarking at Doha; and the same used to be done in Bahrain. Somebody really had a hot-headed sense of optimisation.

At the time when PIA was following this practice, another Gulf airline used to operate six flights every week to and from Karachi.

Today some foreign airlines operate one daily, plus two daily flights for four days a week to Karachi, while our loss-earning and breathing-on-ventilator PIA, in order to give ‘space’ to other foreign airlines, has not just closed even those two ‘half weekly flights’, but has also closed its entire operation and office in Bahrain, which was one of the most lucrative destinations for the airline.

Muhammad Javed

Manama, Bahrain

Published in Dawn, May 8th, 2021