Staff Report
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) on Friday said that the issue of commercial pilots possessing dubious licences brought to light after an investigation into a recent plane crash that claimed the lives of 97 people was not exclusive to the national carrier.
In a tweet, PIA said that the licences were issued by the competent authority and were “valid as per their records”.
“It’s the process and discrepancies through which they were obtained triggered the inquiry by the government and action.”
The issue of dubious licenses drew global attention after Aviation Minister Ghulam Sarwar Khan declared in the National Assembly that 150 pilots from PIA had fake licences. There are 860 active pilots in the country, he had said, adding that of these, 262 pilots did not even take their exams themselves.
A day earlier, Chief Justice of Pakistan (CJP) Gulzar Ahmed summoned the director general of the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) to explain allegations of fake licences by some pilots of different airlines of the country who fly passenger aircraft and thus put the lives of people at stake, a serious offence under the law.
The CAA director general is required to furnish a comprehensive report before the Supreme Court within two weeks in this regard and when the case will be taken up again after three weeks, chief executive officers of the PIA, AirBlue and Serene will also appear before the court with reports about the professional qualification of pilots in their respective airlines. The credibility of CAA and PIA also took a massive hit when the International Air Transport Association expressed concern over the “serious lapse in licensing and safety oversight by the aviation regulator”. Amid the aviation crisis, the PIA management decided to ground 150 pilots and started relieving them from flight rosters for allegedly possessing ‘dubious licences’.
