KARACHI: Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, the chairman of a major Pakistani opposition party, said on Wednesday comments by the aviation minister that 30% of civilian commercial pilots in Pakistan had ‘fake’ licenses had damaged the country’s aviation industry and caused Pakistan international embarrassment.
Aviation Minister Ghulam Sarwar Khan announced last week the grounding of 262 airline pilots suspected of dodging their exams, a move that caused global concern.
The European Union Aviation Safety Agency has since suspended Pakistan International Airlines’ (PIA) authorization to fly to the bloc for six months, a blow to the carrier’s operations.
The United Arab Emirates is also seeking to verify the credentials of Pakistani pilots and engineers employed in its airlines, as international suspicions over “dubious” qualifications of Pakistani pilots mount.
“The minister should never have made such a blanket claim publicly, without being privy to all facts,” Zardari, who is chairman of the Pakistan People’s Party, told Arab News on Wednesday. “His irresponsible statement has put hundreds of careers at risk and caused the nation international embarrassment.”
Ghulam Sarwar Khan and Aviation Division spokesman Abdul Sattar Khokhar did not return several calls seeking comment for this piece. Khan’s press conference scheduled for Wednesday evening was canceled.
Pakistani airline pilots and their union have raised questions about the government list of pilots with “dubious” documents, saying it is full of discrepancies.
PIA has said the list showed discrepancies once the airlines received it. Thirty-six of the 141 had either retired or moved out, it said. Air Blue said seven of the pilots on the list no longer worked for the airline.
The pilots and their union have rejected the list and demanded a judicial investigation.
“The events over the last several days are very worrisome,” PIA Senior Staff Association (SASA) secretary general, Safdar Anjum, told Arab News. “This is [causing] irreparable loss.”
The action on the “dubious” licenses was prompted by the preliminary investigation report on a PIA airliner crash in Karachi that killed 97 people in May. It found the plane’s pilots failed to follow standard procedures and disregarded alarms.