The International Air Transport Authority (IATA) made a five-day visit to Pakistan after which it deemed PIA to have met all safety precautions since its last report in 2018. Considering its disgraceful downfall recently, attributed to hundreds of fake licenses, lack of pilot qualifications, faulty airplane equipment and substandard planes, PIA still has to go above and beyond to regain the faith of the entire nation and provide clarity regarding its functionality.
The Lahore to Karachi plane crash was not an isolated occurrence but was an incident that exposed PIA’s long-standing incompetence and deteriorating service quality. Reports of the issuing of fake pilot licenses were met with confusion as company officials tried to draw a veil over the matter entirely. The placement of blame started with deceitful pilots until a week later when it transferred onto faults in the examination process, then the entire concern was labelled as a simple oversight and now ineffective computing processes are being implicated as the cause behind this entire ordeal. So, which one is it? This is one question that the public has been asking for the past month, demanding for more transparency and accountability.
As time passes, the extremity with which the world penalised Pakistan because of this apparent error is being forgotten. PIA was prohibited from authorising international flights to the EU and the West—a complete boycott for the first time in history. Additionally, interest in domestic flights saw a decline as the public refused to endanger their lives by putting them in the hands of false experts. The natural by-product of all this is a lack of confidence and trust not only in the organisation but in authorities which are tasked with the responsibility to uncover such trickery and ensure that the public is in safe hands. So while the enhanced performance and security report by the IATA is progress, it does not seem to provide the standard of clarity, or promote the translucent operational reports that are needed.