ISLAMABAD: Aviation Minister Ghulam Sarwar Khan says the government is looking to take action against PIA pilots with fake licences and restructure the airline.

“We are not going to privatise PIA, but restructure it,” he said while addressing the Senate session Friday.

He said Pakistan had sent the licences of 176 PIA pilots working internationally, of whom 10 had licences suspected to be fake.

He accused the former governments of recruiting employees in the Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) on dubious and fake degrees.

The minister said that the European Union and the United Kingdom had imposed ban on PIA for six months and added that the national flag carrier can challenge the ban in two months.

In the past, PIA employees have been hired through nepotism, but we want to ensure transparency and appointments on merit, he added.

The minister said he wasn’t blaming anyone but only working to avoid any mishaps in future. “We’ve had four plane crashed in the last few months. We are not pointing fingers…just inquiring into matters,” he said.

“The inquiry we conducted found that 28 of 260 PIA pilots had fake licences and they were later canceled.”

He told the house that 17 pilots and 96 technical stall had been dismissed from service over possession dubious degrees. The minister said that during the investigations, licences of 262 pilots were found dubious.

On June 30, the European Union Air Safety Agency suspended authorisation for PIA to operate in Europe for six months. The airline is already under scrutiny after several problems were uncovered after the May 22 crash in Karachi’s Model Colony.

In a letter dated July 13, 2020, Civil Aviation Authority Director General Hassan Nasir Jamy notified his counterpart in Oman that none of the CAA-issued pilot licenses were fake.

This contradicted what Khan had revealed in June and he therefore drew criticism from opposition members. NNI