Pakistan’s state-run airline said Thursday it will ground 150 pilots, accusing them of obtaining licenses by having others take exams for them after a probe into last month’s crash that killed 97 people in Karachi.
Abdullah Hafeez, a spokesman for Pakistan International Airlines, didn’t give additional details about the cheating but said a process to fire the pilots has been initiated.
“We will make it sure that such unqualified pilots never fly aircraft again,” he said, adding that safety of passengers is the airline’s top priority.
The move by PIA to ground the pilots comes a day after the country’s aviation minister, Ghulam Sarwar Khan, said 262 out of 860 Pakistani pilots have ‘fake’ licenses. He made the revelation while presenting preliminary findings of a probe to parliament into the May 22 Airbus A320 aircraft crash.
The announcement stunned lawmakers present in the National Assembly and shocked family members of passengers who died last month when Flight PK8303 after departing from Lahore went down in a congested residential area in Karachi, killing 97 people, including all the crew members. There were only two survivors.
Neither Khan nor Hafeez released additional details about the alleged methods used by the pilots to wrongfully obtain licenses to fly commercial planes. But officials familiar with the process involved in issuing pilot’s licenses said an unspecified number of people who had the skills to fly a plane but lacked technical knowledge had in the past bribed qualified persons to take exams for them.
Irregularities found in pilot licences at PIA represent a ‘serious lapse’ in safety controls, global airlines body IATA said on Thursday after the carrier grounded one third of its pilots. “We are following reports from Pakistan regarding fake pilot licences, which are concerning and represent a serious lapse in the licensing and safety oversight by the aviation regulator,” an IATA spokesperson said, adding that the organisation is seeking more information.
