May 19, 2007	Saturday	Jamadi-ul-Awwal 02, 1428

ISLAMABAD, May 18: A false warning about a malfunctioning engine had prompted the pilot of the Birmingham-bound flight PK-791 to abort the plane’s take-off on Thursday, an informed source told Dawn on Friday.

"Engineers could not locate the problem after ground checks, including boroscope inspection," the source said, adding that it had been concluded that it was a false warning.

The pilot of the aircraft, wet leased from SAGA Airlines, aborted the take-off when the plane failed to draw power from engine no. 1 while taxiing out.

This was the latest in a series of mishaps encountered by PIA aircraft. No one was injured in Thursday’s incident, but emergency chutes were deployed for evacuation, and the runway of the Islamabad airport remained closed for almost five hours.

The passengers were shifted to another aircraft which left at 9.00pm.

The TC-SGB aircraft had developed another problem a couple of days ago, but the engineers had failed to detect that fault as well.

CAA Director of Airworthiness Ghulam Murtaza told Dawn that the aircraft would now have to undertake a test flight for determining the fault.

But, before that is done and a clean chit obtained from the aviation regulator, the PIA management has scheduled the aircraft for the Lahore-Glasgow flight, PK-779, departing at Saturday noon.

A PIA spokesman claimed that the positioning of flight from Islamabad to Lahore on Saturday morning would be taken as a test-flight.

Riddled with financial woes, the national airline is facing a shortage of aircraft because of a European Union ban on most of its planes on account of safety concerns. Flights to EU countries had to be slashed by 50 per cent due to unavailability of aircraft because of the ban.