European air safety regulators have lifted a ban on Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) operating flights to the bloc after flights were suspended for nearly five years.
Pakistani airlines were added to Europe’s so-called Air Safety List – a roster of some of the most dangerous airlines in the world – in June 2020 after it emerged that around 40% of PIA’s pilots may have held fake flying licenses.
The revelation that Pakistan’s civil aviation authority had somehow allowed hundreds of pilots to fly commercial passenger jets without an official license emerged following the publication of an interim report into the crash of a PIA plane in Karachi in May 2020 that killed 97 passengers and crew onboard.
The accident occurred when the pilots mistakenly retracted the landing gears of the Airbus A320 back into the belly of the airplane as it was on final approach to Karachi Airport. The pilots only noticed their mistake when the plane’s underside dragged along the runway for several thousand feet.
The pilots aborted the landing and performed a go-around, but the engines had been badly damaged, and they both failed shortly after the pilots had cleared the runway.
In the immediate aftermath of the accident, PIA suspended 150 pilots suspected of having fake licenses. A year earlier, the airline sacked 16 pilots who were found to have fake university degrees.
The revelations were so serious that the European Air Safety Agency (EASA) decided to ban Pakistani airlines from the EU over fears that the country’s civil aviation authorities lacked the ability to comply with international standards.
But on Friday, Pakistan was removed from Europe’s Air Safety List, with a spokesperson for EASA saying the agency had “re-established sufficient confidence in the PCAA oversight capabilities.”
In a Facebook post, PIA said it was “fully committed to safety” and would soon return to its European destinations.
Pakistan does, however, remain on a separate Air Safety List maintained by the United Kingdom. EASA’s decision may, though, influence British regulators to follow suit soon.
