Staff are protesting against a proposed code-sharing agreement with Turkish Airlines that would entail PIA relinquishing most of its routes to Europe and the United States, and against the suspension of five pilots on disciplinary grounds.
On its website, PIA listed 13 scheduled flights as cancelled — although three of these were due to bad weather — and six as delayed, including one to London.
Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani delegated his defence minister to resolve the strike “urgently”, calling for a negotiated agreement between staff and management “in the larger interest” of the national carrier, his office said.
Five pilots were recently suspended and around 70 PIA employees forced into compulsory leave last month for “agitation” against management plans, a senior company official told AFP on condition of anonymity.
The proposed code-share, which still needs to be approved by the government and regulators, would mean PIA relinquishing lucrative routes to Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and US destinations New York and Chicago.
PIA last year asked the government, already saddled with mounting debt and struggling to contain the fallout from catastrophic flooding, to write off losses of $1.7 billion to save it from looming bankruptcy.
Airline spokesman Mashhood Tajwar played down the fallout of the strike, saying the situation at Islamabad airport, where a backlog of planes unable to take off was building up, had “started to improve”.
He said about 2,000 passengers had been affected by strike action on Wednesday, on top of 1,500 affected Tuesday.
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