March 30, 2003

ON the morning of May 25, 1965, the telephone rang. It was Enver Jamall and he asked me to get to the office immediately. It was a calm voice, but there was an urgency to it. It could be only bad news and I feared it could be worse. I rushed to his office. Nur Khan was in New York and Enver Jamall was in charge. The top brass of the airline had already arrived and from their glum faces, it was apparent that we had gathered for a crisis meeting.

The previous night, I had been at the airport to see off PIA’s inaugural flight to Cairo. In fact, it had been a re-inaugural. PIA had a service to Cairo, but had suspended it. Now, with a China link, it had been reintroduced. A number of travel agents and journalists were on the inaugural flight. As a matter of policy on such flights, we invited the media through its management or editors. The choice of which individual would go on an inaugural flight was not mine. I had initiated this policy and it made good sense. If there was any heart-burning, no blame could come to PIA.

In the past, individuals had tried to put pressure on me, but I was able to pass the buck to their editors. Still, there were many friends of mine on that Cairo flight, including M.B. Khalid (Pista), who was working for The Business Recorder. ‘Pista’ Khalid had been one of the stalwarts of our Zelin’s Coffee House days. He and I had covered many a story, played many a rubber of Bridge. Like Robert Frost, Khalid, too, had a lover’s quarrel with the world. He was a ferocious journalist and the most decent person in the world where, to be decent, was to invite pain and heartbreak. Ayub Khan’s martial law had made journalists such as Khalid redundant, and he had left Karachi in a huff for the Philippines and married a lovely Filipino girl. He had returned to pick up the pieces of his career. Khalid had arrived at the airport without his passport, and I had read the riot act to him and sent him back in a PIA car. He had been the last passenger to board the flight.

There had been another journalist whose passport had expired. Despite my best efforts, the immigration authorities had refused to allow him to board the flight. I had even tried to telephone the Director of Passports, but without success. He was left behind and he somehow blamed me. PIA was represented by ‘Jimmy’ Mirza, the Commercial Director and one of the most able officers of PIA. I was very close to him. Two of our senior captains, Ali Khan and Jauhar were operating the flight, two of the best. We had our VIP cabin crew including Momi Durrani, a Pathan girl, tall and fair with film-star looks. We had featured Momi in our advertisements. When she smiled, she made others smile.

Originally, I was due to go on the inaugural flight, but decided to send Salahuddin Siddiqui, my press-officer, who was keen to go. In any case, I was planning to go a day later.

Bad news travels faster than good news, and even as I was leaving my house for the office, someone had telephoned me to ask whether it was true that there had been a PIA crash. There was the sinking feeling that was the reason why I had been summoned. Enver Jamall handed me a telex that cryptically said that the inaugural flight had met with an accident. That is all the information we had at that time. A telephone call had been booked for Cairo. We waited for the call to come through. The silence in the room was deafening and each one of us seemed to be simply staring ahead, lost in dark thoughts, hoping against forlorn hope that there may have been some mistake.

The call came through and Enver Jamall took it. A certain sadness crept on his face. My admiration for him went up manifold. He was providing exactly the kind of leadership that was needed. He kept his calm as he confirmed our worst fears. The Boeing 707 had crashed as it was coming in to land. There was no information about the fatalities. Were there any survivors? The aircraft was still burning in the desert.

An air crash was news. An inaugural flight was big news. A flight carrying so many journalists was big, big, big news. I knew that I was going to be so busy that there would be no luxury of grieving.

My problem was that I was short-staffed. My deputy, M.A. Jamil, was on leave, recovering from a serious illness. Siddiqui had gone to Cairo and the others on my staff merely made up the numbers. There was Akbar Ali, my personal assistant and he rolled up his sleeves and went to work. I sent for Khalid Butt from Lahore. By this time, we knew that 119 passengers had perished and there were six survivors. This had been finally confirmed after several false starts. Among the survivors was Siddiqui, Shaukat Mecklai and Jalal Karimi, three others whose names I do not remember, but they were among the lucky ones.

My office was like a madhouse. The telephone never stopped ringing and a horde of reporters had arrived at my office. I was doing the best I could or what was humanly possible.

Communications between ourselves and the Cairo office were very poor. The manager in Cairo, Anwer Khan, was having to divide his time between his office and the crash site. Whatever information I had was made public. Still, the suspicion lingered that we had something to hide. There was much speculation about the cause of the accident. There had been a Chinese delegation on board. Who were they? And this became a mystery and a news report worthy of speculation. Some passenger had surreptitiously left the aircraft at Dharan. What was that about? None of this was relevant and it took a long time for the story to get stable. I was at my desk for three days and nights, going home only to change. The telephone never ceased to stop ringing. My patience was running out, but I knew I had to keep my cool.

Most of all, there was the personal anguish. So many colleagues and so many friends had died. I needed someone to handle public relations at the Cairo end. Nur Khan had returned and I told him that I wanted to send Fareed S. Jafri, and Nur Khan agreed. Fareed was my former boss at the Pakistan Standard and he knew the Middle East. He had served in Cairo as a war correspondent for Reuters during World War II. I talked to him and he readily agreed.

Our manager in Cairo was experiencing many difficulties. There were dead bodies lying in the morgue that were beyond recognition. It was decided to have a mass grave for them, and this presented anguish of its own. These were hard decisions and they were played up in the press so that the story kept running. There were the survivors, and we had to issue daily bulletins on how they were doing. They were in a Cairo hospital.

The foreign press had also been active and it had played up the presence of the Chinese delegation and introducing a cloak-and-dagger element in the crash. There were stories that some nomads had been the first people at the crash site and they had looted the watches and other jewellery that the dead passengers were wearing. This was, of course, not true. In the cargo hold had been a shipment of monkeys and they had survived the crash. It was the only light touch in the grisly story.

The survivors arrived and were greeted by hundreds at the airport. Relatives and friends were understandable, but what about the others? What were they doing there? I asked one such person as I was waiting for the aircraft to taxi to a halt. He said he had come out of curiosity. What was he expecting to see? He wasn’t sure.

My mind went back to a visit I had made to the United States a few months after I had joined PIA. I had gone to take a look at the PR set-up of Pan Am. While in New York, I had a session with Admiral Miller who was Pan Am’s PR vice-president. He took me to lunch at the New York Yacht Club. We talked about airlines, rather he talked and I listened, and about pure jets that were beginning to arrive on the commercial scene. The Comets had been operational for some time, the jet-age meant the arrival of the Boeing 707s. These jets would not only halve the travelling time, but would double the payload. I remember him saying with some wonder: “Boy, just imagine one of those hitting a mountain.” I had asked him how Pan Am dealt with an air crash. “We have a manual,” he had said, matter-of-factly.

I very much doubt that there was any manual that could have dealt with the Cairo crash. From a PR point of view, everything that could have gone wrong, went wrong. But we had responded positively. In what was the airline’s darkest hour could also be its finest. I was not the only one who was putting in long hours. Everyone else was doing the same. I felt that every employee should have been awarded a medal for the fortitude with which he or she had handled the loss.

It also said something for PIA in the eyes of the public. There was no loss of confidence in the airline. It was a bad time for the airline, but after the initial shock, there was a great deal of sympathy. In due course, one learns to get philosophic about tragedies. One must accept them with a silence of the heart. And when I think back on my days and months and years with PIA, I recall them with varying emotions.

The Cairo crash is a separate memory, entire in itself. In the circumstances, I had done a good job. I wondered how I would have handled the story had I been on the other side of the desk, been a newspaper reporter or editor as I had once been. I don’t think I would have done differently to what the newspapers had done with the Cairo crash.

Please Visit our Sponsor (Ads open in separate window)