What I have heard that his process of his 'security clearance' was taking longer than expected after which PIA would have discussed a formal offer with him. Indians simply beat us to it
Air India also is the larger airline with the bigger challenge technically - PIA is basically a minnow of a mess with a microcosm of air traffic compared to what Air India has to deal with.
With Air India you’re trying to turn a full-scale flag carrier into something that can actually fight it out with the big boys on long-haul, while also not falling apart on the domestic side. PIA is a cleanup job on a small, politically tangled, chronically under-scaled carrier. Air India is a high-stakes rebuild of a network, fleet, brand, and culture at a size that actually matters globally.
What was his alternative with PIA btw? To sit in Islamabad, or Karachi, waiting upon some worthy for “security clearance,” while the files moved at the speed of our usual national lethargy, and every retired air marshal explained how
he would have done it better??
On a resume - Air India is a sentence. PIA is an embarrassing footnote. One is a country trying,
however clumsily, to put a serious carrier back in the sky. The other is a country that cannot keep a park, a pavement, or a public enterprise without first looting it and then composing a patriotic song about the remains.
www.fauji.org.pk
