The Bc --> J/psi pi, etac pi decays are studied with the perturbative QCD approach. It is found that form factors and branching ratios are sensitive to the parameters w, v, f_J/psi and f_etac, where w and v are the parameters of the charmonium wave functions for Coulomb potential and harmonic oscillator potential, respectively, f_J/psi and f_etac are the decay constants of the J/psi and etac mesons, respectively. The large branching ratios and the clear signals of the final states make the Bc --> J/psi pi, etac pi decays to be the prospective channels for measurements at the hadron colliders