Funds hold-up causes inordinate delays, cancellations of PIA flights: report

ISLAMABAD: The Pakistan International Airlines Corporation Limited (PIACL) faced inordinate delays in the current fiscal year owing to the non-release of the allocated funds and non-supply of fuel by the Pakistan State Oil.

According documents obtained by the Hum Investigation Team (HIT), while the airline demonstrated some control over these issues between January and September 2023, it still lagged behind private carriers in the country in terms of maintaining punctuality.

Officials of the PIACL presented a comprehensive report on the subject of flight delays and cancellations to the Senate Standing Committee on Civil Aviation. According to the data acquired by the HIT, during the current year, PIACL had scheduled a total of 21,130 flights. However, 2,178 of these flights were canceled, while 18,952 experienced delays. Among these delayed flights, 7,381 were significantly behind schedule, whereas 11,571 managed to operate as planned, the report said.

Analyzing the monthly breakdown, it became palpable that January saw the highest number of delays, with 1,131 flights affected, along with 256 cancellations.

August followed with 983 delays and 120 cancellations. Similarly, September recorded 908 flight delays and 172 cancellations.

Notably, in the case of local flights, 30 out of 309 flights to Skardu were canceled, and 169 out of 540 flights to Gilgit suffered the same fate.

Authorities said that the earmarked Rs22.9 billion from December 2022 to June 2023, if released, will play a crucial role in significantly enhancing PIACL’s operational performance.

According to the report, PIACL Component Support Programme (CSP) was suspended by respective service providers ie Ms Boeing and Air France Industries due to non-payment of their outstanding dues, and resultantly, required spare parts could not be timely arranged

The report said that the Pakistan State Oil (PSO) and international fuel suppliers occasionally suspended the delivery of fuel multiple times due to payment backlogs, and this caused delayed departure of multiple flights.

According to the report, multiple aircraft/ engine lessors have issued default/legal notices as the PIACL has not been able to pay-off the lease rental obligations and lessors have directed to ground their aircraft or remove the leased engines even from PAICL-owned aircraft.

PSO ‘restores’ fuel supply to PIA

“The PIACL’s spares’ stock position is also a contributing factor and on multiple occasions, purchased, repaired aircraft parts and rotables were held-up by customs authorities demanding payment of taxes/ FED prior to release of parts from import section.

According to the report, the afore-mentioned issues mainly occurred due to discontinuation of financial assistance by the government of Pakistan (GoP) that discontinued the mark-up support since December 2022.

“The GoP approvals disseminated vide letter No. 9(1)/2017-F dated 27 February, 2018 for reimbursement of markup on GoP guaranteed loans was authorized from FY 2018-19 for a period of five years with provision in federal budget to be maintained by the MOF and discontinuation of same prematurely has aggravated the situation,” the report said.

It said that accumulated mark-up support from December 2022 to June 2023 of Rs22.9 billion, if provided, will enable the PIACL to improve its performance significantly.