PIA used to be a great airline. Dad traveled from New Delhi to Karachi and back in 1982. Had an entertaining story about how the air hostesses took off their headdresses as soon as the pilot announced that he had cleared Pakistani airspace. It was also a ‘dry’ flight, probably because of the Zia years.
PIA suffered moistly the same dose that Air India did.
If you want to ruin a large enterprise, give it to the government to run. Both airlines suffered from bureaucratic red tape, over staffing, and taking years to make small changes.
In the initial years, both the airlines performed well, had great user ratings. So what changed?
This model worked fine when they were both small airlines- but when they tried to expand, they ran into problems because of the bloated management structure and introducing government ideology in a capitalist enterprise.
Since this is the government, they cannot easily reduce staff, or even hire new ones. Hiring policies are geared towards hiring more numbers of people, rather than hiring a higher quality of people. Airplane buying policies are geared towards making whatever country you need a favor from happy, rather than actual needs.
The Russians built 5 or 3- persons crewed aircraft well after the rest of the world was using 2- person cockpits, just because their communist model needed to show higher employment numbers. It took them years to ‘lose’ the enforced need for that extra crew member. So an extra crew member had to be paid and pensioned, despite there being no need. Who do you think bore the cost?
Add to that corruption, cronyism, their being no punishment for bad performance, or reward for good one, and you get an employee workforce that only wants to get the bare minimum done. Anything more, and they can go on strike, without fear of losing jobs.
The only reason Air India has more presence than PIA today is because the Indian government can afford to waste a greater amount of money on its national airline than Pakistan, what with the 30,000 crore loan bailouts and such.
I have been told that PIA has mostly let go of its domestic routes to private carriers like Shaheen Air and Airblue. It only flies to international destinations like Saudi, UAE, London, New York and Madrid.
Like AI, it too has complaints of flight delays and bad on board service.
Both governments are trying to privatize their airlines. Pakistan tried in 2013 and India is doing it right now. Of course, in order to take on something like AI, every investor will want the government to first get rid of the multi- thousand crore debt. Same goes for PIA.