National News Desk
Islamabad: Pakistan’s national flag carrier cleared 110 pilots out of 141 whose flying licences had been suspended in the context of a false degree dispute, according to a media report on Tuesday.
Senior advocate Salman Akram Raja informed the Supreme Court of the matter on Monday while representing the airlines.
The three- magistrate, headed by Chief Justice Gulzar Ahmed, appealed to the PIA Chief Executive Officer Air Marshal Arshad Malik against an order of the Sindh High Court. Dawn reported that Raja had claimed that PIA had cleared 110 pilots and cancelled 15, while 14 pilots had been declared unfit to fly. He said that a couple of cases were pending decisions.
The information came when Justice Umar Ata Bandial asked what steps had been taken by the airline to check the suspended licences and whether the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) was pushing the matter forward enough to get back to business by verifying the licences.
License issues arose in the wake of the tragic crash of the PIA aircraft in Karachi on May 22, killing about 95 people, when Ghulam Sarwar Khan, Minister of Aviation, told the media that 260 of the country’s 860 active pilots had either fake licences or cheated in their tests.
It raised widespread concerns about the safety of PIA, and the EU prohibited its flights, and the airlines initially grounded 150 pilots to check their record, but some of them were cleared after the initial test.