The director general (DG) of the Pakistan Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) has issued a final warning to the managing director (MD) of the Pakistan International Airlines Corporation (PIA) over poor fleet maintenance, Pakistan Today has learnt.
The CAA DG has warned the PIA MD that the authority would ban the aircrafts from flying if the airline fails to retain the maintenance standards, said the sources.
They said CAA DG Air Marshall (retd) Khalid Chaudhry gave PIA MD Capt Nadeem Khan Yousafzai a call and chided the latter over the fleet’s poor maintenance and shortcomings recently ascertained by French civil aviation authority Direction Générale de l’Aviation Civile (DGAC).
“Chaudhry told Yousafzai that every aircraft bound for Europe will be first inspected by the CAA and if no shortcomings are found, it will be allowed to fly. He said if the PIA failed to control the maintenance issues, the authority will ban the airline’s planes from flying,” they added.
The DGAC had detected 40 inadequacies in PIA aircraft Airbus A310 during a Safety Assessment of Foreign Aircraft (SAFA) inspection on August 9.
The French authority had informed the CAA that the former had also detected a fuel leak from one of the engines of the said aircraft flying from Paris to Lahore, following which all the passengers were asked to disembark and the plane was impounded.
In a letter dated August 23, DGAC Director Gilbert Guicheney had asked the Pakistan CAA to furnish the former with complete details regarding compliance/rectification of snags discovered in the PIA airplane.
Guicheney had demanded a detailed evaluation of the inadequacies, and efficiency and implementation of the corrective action plan proposed by the PIA with regard to the identified safety vulnerabilities.
The director had also asked the CAA for other details that could serve as a concrete assurance as regards the safety level of PIA operations.
According to sources, PIA’s aircraft was returning home from Milan when it had landed at the Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris on August 9.
They said the French aviation inspectors had checked the airplane and detected almost 40 snags in it, and then directed the crew to ask the passengers to disembark the aircraft, following which the plane was seized.
One of the snags that the inspectors had pointed out regarding the crew’s lack of efficiency was that the crew was not able to manage a quick and correct emergency evacuation of the aircraft on the fireman’s request, and the disembarking of the 95 passengers with luggage was carried out 20 minutes after the fireman’s request, the sources added.
