PIA tells top court 110 of 114 pilots cleared in ‘fake licenses’ case

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan International Airlines informed the Supreme Court of Pakistan this week that 110 pilots out of 141 whose licenses to fly had been suspended in a fake licenses case had been cleared to fly.
The loss-making carrier has been looking to reduce costs, particularly since the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, as well as the fallout from a fake pilot credentials scandal in the aftermath of a May jet crash in which 97 people were killed.
PIA’s lawyer Salman Akram Raja informed a three-judge SC bench headed by Chief Justice Gulzar Ahmed on Monday that PIA had cleared 110 pilots to fly, canceled the licenses of 15 and declared 14 unfit to fly. A few cases were still pending decision, he said.
Earlier this year, the government said PIA had a total of 434 pilots. Some of their jobs have been terminated in an ongoing process of investigating their credentials.
With more than $4 billion in accumulated losses, PIA was already struggling financially when flights were grounded in March because of the pandemic. Just as it resumed operations in May, a domestic PIA flight crashed in Karachi, prompting an inquiry that pointed to a number of safety failures, and sparked a disclosure from authorities that nearly a third of PIA’s pilots may have falsified their qualifications. EASA, the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and other regulators reacted by banning PIA flights.
PIA had halted commercial flights to the United States before the ban, but was flying charter flights and had planned to restart operations there soon.
The European ban hurt its revenues from overseas sectors such as London, Manchester and Birmingham that were to be a cornerstone of PIA’s turnaround strategy.
The business plan put together by the PIA management last year and published by media saw those UK routes and new European destinations as key to its turnaround strategy, which also involved inducting at least seven new aircraft to its fleet by 2022.
The year “2020 would be a break-even year followed by return to profitability in 2023,” said the turnaround plan.
The expansion plans are now on hold, and the airline plans to revise its turnaround strategy in consultation with the International Air Transport Association, international media has reported.