If you’ve flown through Addis Ababa in the last fifteen years, you’ve probably experienced something that PIA passengers haven’t experienced in a long time: an African airline that runs on time, maintains its own fleet at a profit, and connects a dozen African capitals to the rest of the world through a single hub. The man who built that operation into what it is today is Tewolde GebreMariam, who led Ethiopian Airlines as Group CEO from 2011 until his retirement a couple of years ago. According to multiple reports, he’s now the government’s pick to take over PIA.

If you want to understand what this means, the first thing to know is that Ethiopian Airlines and PIA are not in the same league. They haven’t been for decades. Ethiopian is the most profitable airline on the African continent, runs one of the youngest fleets in the world, and has built an intra-African network that competes with the Gulf carriers on routes they used to dominate. PIA, by contrast, has been in some form of operational or financial crisis for most of the last fifteen years, and the privatisation process that was meant to fix it has been slow, contested, and partial. Bringing in someone who has actually done the job of turning around a state-linked carrier in a tough market is, on paper, the most serious leadership hire the airline has had in a generation.

Why Ethiopian’s playbook matters here

Ethiopian Airlines’ success wasn’t built on a single magic decision. It was built on a long series of unglamorous ones: investing in a young fleet when competitors were operating 25-year-old aircraft, building a maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) business that became a profit centre in its own right, developing a hub strategy that connected secondary African cities through Addis Ababa, and crucially, retaining management independence from the Ethiopian government even though the state is the majority shareholder. The combination produced an airline that consistently makes money, even on routes that other carriers consider unprofitable.

Some of those moves translate directly to PIA. A young fleet is overdue; PIA’s average aircraft age is well above what a well-run carrier should be operating. The MRO opportunity is real — Pakistan sits at the crossroads of South, Central, and West Asia, which is a better geographic position for a maintenance hub than Addis Ababa. The hub strategy, with Karachi or Islamabad as the connecting point, is harder because of the airline’s reputation damage, but the underlying geography is in PIA’s favour if the operational basics can be fixed.

What the government needs to give him

The hire is only as good as the operating environment. Tewolde’s success at Ethiopian came with a high degree of management independence — the Ethiopian government was the majority shareholder but did not interfere in day-to-day commercial decisions. PIA’s situation is messier: the airline has been through multiple government-appointed CEOs, each with different political mandates, and the relationship between management and the various federal ministries that oversee the airline has historically been more fraught.

For this appointment to mean anything, the government has to be willing to do something it has historically been bad at: give the new CEO a real mandate, with commercial authority over routes, fleet, hiring, and pricing, and protect that mandate from political interference for long enough to make a difference. The privatisation process that has been underway should help, because a private or partially-private ownership structure is more likely to insist on commercial discipline than a fully state-owned operator. But the test will be in the first six to twelve months, when the inevitable politically-difficult decisions come up and the pressure to overrule the CEO will be strongest.

What Pakistani travellers should expect

For ordinary PIA passengers, the realistic expectation over the next one to three years is incremental improvement rather than a sudden transformation. A young, well-maintained fleet doesn’t materialise overnight; building a credible hub operation takes years; rebuilding trust with corporate and leisure travellers takes even longer. What you can reasonably expect is that the on-time performance, the cleanliness of the cabins, the reliability of the schedule, and the safety culture start to converge on international standards within a couple of years, with the bigger structural improvements (new routes, a refreshed brand, a return to the long-haul markets PIA has largely abandoned) following on a longer timeline.

The honest assessment is that the appointment is one of the most credible leadership moves the airline has seen, and the prior track record of the person in question is genuinely impressive. The risk is that the institutional and political environment makes the playbook impossible to execute. If the government is serious about giving the new CEO the room to do the job, this is a real chance. If the same old political interference patterns reassert themselves, the appointment will end up as a footnote.

What to watch in the first year

A few things will tell you quickly whether this is working. Fleet decisions — what new aircraft are ordered, what old ones are retired, whether the right aircraft are deployed on the right routes. Route decisions — whether PIA reopens or expands long-haul routes that have been dormant, and how the regional network evolves. Hiring decisions — whether the new CEO is allowed to bring in his own commercial team, or whether the senior staff remains the same old civil-service rotation. And crucially, on-time performance — the single number that, more than any other, tells you whether the operational basics are being taken seriously.

If those four signals move in the right direction over the first twelve months, this appointment will be remembered as the moment PIA’s long decline finally began to reverse. If they don’t, it’ll be remembered as a missed opportunity, and the next round of “PIA turnaround” headlines will start writing themselves.

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Source: Reports citing PIA’s privatisation process and leadership selection.