✈️ Pakistan looks big. Its economy doesn’t.

240 million people. 5th largest population on earth. And yet 78% of all domestic flights connect just three cities: Karachi, Islamabad, Lahore.

Findings from Gallup Pakistan Digital Analytics aviation dashboard accessible here : https://lnkd.in/gNfTP3Nm

This isn’t a population problem. It’s a business logic problem — and aviation makes it unusually easy to see.

Airlines don’t serve people, they serve addressable demand: travelers with disposable income, frequent trip need, and enough density to make a route profitable. Pakistan has that in exactly three places.

Everywhere else — Multan, Faisalabad, Peshawar, Sukkur, Quetta, cities with millions of residents each — gets a handful of flights a day, if any.

Compare that to Gilgit and Skardu. Tiny populations, but real flight share — because there’s no functional alternative for months at a time. Airlines will serve a market with almost no substitute. They won’t serve a “good enough by road” second-tier city, no matter how many people live there.

And here’s the bigger tell: ~57% of all Pakistani flights go to the Gulf. The real growth market isn’t connecting Pakistani cities to each other — it’s moving Pakistanis out of the country for work. That’s where the commercial incentive points, and capacity follows it.

Eighteen years of data shows this concentration hasn’t loosened — it’s just shifted between the same three cities (Karachi losing share, Islamabad gaining), while no fourth city has ever broken in.

This is worth sitting with beyond aviation. Retail chains, bank branches, e-commerce fulfillment, specialized healthcare — they likely cluster the same way, for the same reason. Pakistan’s population is spread across dozens of million-plus cities. Its economy, the one businesses actually price decisions on, is concentrated in three.

This is my view . Happy to hear your view.

📊 GDAP | Gallup Pakistan Digital Analytics