- PIA pilots with dodgy credentials cause international consternation
That no less than 152 PIA pilots had dodgy flying licenses would indicate that PIA CEO Air Marshal Arshad Malik’s action, of requesting to be provided the names so that the offending pilots could be grounded, is correct. Indeed, the grounding of all such pilots is a bare minimum, especially in view of the notice being taken internationally. The International Association of Travel Agents has taken notice of this problem, which has the potential of ballooning into an international incident, with just one foreign civil aviation regulator refusing a pilot permission to land or take off, because it did not accept his license, possibly setting off a chain of events that could leave PIA flights cancelled.
This situation has developed because of the discovery by the Aviation Minister, Ghulam Sarwar Khan, that the Civil Aviation Authority had found PIA pilots in large numbers with problems with their licenses, including having impersonators appear for them in professional examinations. This emerged in the course of investigations into the recent PIA plane crash at Karachi. It was perhaps unfortunate that pilot and co-pilot of that ill-fated flight have been damned by association. If the license of either was dubious, that should have been stated; if not, that should have been stated openly.
This occurring during the pandemic-induced downturn in commercial flying is a blessing rather than a curse, because it means that PIA would be cancelling flights anyhow, so there would be that much less temptation to keep unlicensed pilots flying. However, two issues must be resolved. PIA would look to recruit new pilots, and the tendency to look to retired PAF personnel must be resisted. While that resource should not be neglected, it should not be allowed to take over, as it well might, what with a serving air marshal PIA’s CEO. Also, there is something seriously flawed with the licensing system. The accomplices of the pilots with dodgy licenses must be traced, exposed and punished. Otherwise the kind of disgrace not just pilots, but the entire nation, are facing, will be repeated, not to mention the hundreds of passengers put at risk in the aircraft they flew.
