Renovator’s delight

Rescuing  SriLankan from a “bottomless pit”

The world’s worst managed airline? There would be a fair few candidates here and there around the globe but very rarely would their owners admit it. Not so with state-owned SriLankan Airlines.

According to Sri Lanka’s Minister of Special Assignments, Dr Sarath Amunugama, speaking at a conference in Colombo on March 31, if you look at one of the worst-managed state enterprises “in the whole history of the world economy”, SriLankan airlines will be in the top 10. That he was speaking at a seminar on Sri Lanka-China relations organised by the Bandaranaike Centre for International Studies was probably neither here nor there, but he certainly had a point when he added that the carrier is a “bottomless pit”. It owes at least US$1 billion and every flight employs 360 workers. Just how bad that is can be judged by the fact that when it was at its worst a few years ago, Air India was castigated for having 221 employees per aircraft, compared to somewhere between 100 and 150 for major operators such as Singapore Airlines, Lufthansa and British Airways.