Kennedy photo taken off wall as Pakistan Air seeks revival

As the new head of Pakistan International Airlines, Bernd Hildenbrand faces the biggest challenge of his career: getting the state-owned carrier to think about the future instead of living in the past. One of the first things the 61-year-old Deutsche Lufthansa AG veteran did after taking the helm in May was to remove hundreds of old photos from the entrance of PIA’s headquarters glorifying its past. That included one of US former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy. “Nice photos, really nice, Kennedy did fly with PIA, wonderful, but it doesn’t help us now,” Hildenbrand, the bespectacled carrier’s acting chief executive officer, said in an interview in his office in Karachi, Pakistan’s commercial capital. “We have to make a leapfrog and go into the future.”<br/>Hildenbrand is attempting to turn around an airline which has been hobbled by frequent labor strife, hasn’t made an annual profit in the past decade and has a higher debt burden than Singapore Airlines Ltd. and Malaysia’s AirAsia X Bhd. combined. It has also lost market share to Gulf carriers. The modernization plan includes introducing flat beds in business class for the first time this month on flights to London. The national flag carrier will also lease aircraft and increase its fleet to 100 by 2025, from a current 38. Emirates has 251 planes, according to its annual report. PIA “projects as a workers’ airline, flying workers from Pakistan to Qatar, Oman, Bahrain and Dubai, and doesn’t have a luxury product perception,” said Mark D. Martin, founder of Dubai-based Martin Consulting LLC. “It needs to figure out what it aspires to be and its place in the world.”<br/>