UK-Pakistan air travel: PIA drives growth, but market remains small
Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) is relaunching Islamabad-Birmingham on 1-Dec-2026 and increased its frequencies on two London services from 1-Nov-2026.
PIA resumed UK services in Oct-2025 after a five year ban from UK airspace. The return to Birmingham will be its fifth route added since then, taking its weekly capacity in Dec-2026 to five times what it was a year earlier. The only other UK-Pakistan operator is British Airways, which operates London Gatwick-Islamabad.
In spite of the growth driven by PIA, the market between the two countries remains smaller than before the ban and small compared with UK-India (adjusting for different population sizes), in spite of there being a similar number of people in the UK of Pakistani ethnicity as Indian ethnicity.
Reasons for this include the dominance of connecting hubs in the Gulf/Türkiye, the price-sensitive VFR-led nature of the UK-Pakistan market and reputational concerns.
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