ISLAMABAD: Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) has announced it will cut special salaries, allowances and perks of its aircraft engineers by 50 percent from next year, the national carrier’s spokesperson said on Monday.
“The special salaries and allowances of the aircraft engineers will be reduced by 50 percent from January 2021. This has been done to rationalize the resources and allowances of our engineering staff,” PIA spokesman Abdullah Hafeez Khan told Arab News.
He said the allowances had been rationalized to more realistic levels based on current qualification and licensing.
“A lot of PIA engineers were getting the allowances for the equipment that is not part of our fleet now such as Boeing 747 and few airbuses. This move will not save much finances to the organization but it will bring a realistic and just allowance structure.”
Moreover, the pilots of the national carrier will be paid 50 hours guarantee allowance instead of 75 hours, Khan said: “Pilots were getting flying allowances with minimum guarantee of 75 hours which have also been rationalized and now they will get benefit after flying for 50 hours.”
He said the organization was going through a lot of changes to improve its performance and viability.
“We have just introduced a Voluntary Separation Scheme (VSS) through which we expect 2500 people to benefit from it. It is in the pipeline as all the preparations have been finalized and notification has been issued today. The persons who will avail scheme will leave PIA on 31st December 2020,” Khan said.
The Economic Coordination Committee (ECC) of the Cabinet last month approved the Aviation Division’s summary regarding cash support to implement the voluntary separation scheme. The ECC approved Rs12.87 billion as the cost of VSS to be paid in about two and a half years time.
PIA is a state-run entity that has incurred billions of rupees of losses for the last several years. In recent years, the government has tried several measures to cut down PIA’s annual losses and approved bailout packages to keep it financially afloat.
