RAWALPINDI: The waiting areas at Benazir Bhutto International Airport are filled with dejected travellers who should’ve been elsewhere by now. But thanks to a pilots’ strike, nearly all of them now have to face delays and cancellations, or resort to buying more expensive tickets from other airlines.

Yasmin Akhter, 34, sits on the bench in the passenger lounge with her eyes glued to the flight information display screen. The banker has been at the airport for almost six hours, but doesn’t know when, or if at all, she will be able to fly to Lahore. “I spent the weekend with my parents in Chakwal and was supposed to fly to Lahore to resume work on Tuesday,” she said.

Mushtaq Ahmed, who was travelling to Skardu, told Dawn he obtained his ticket 15 days ago since he wanted to make it in time for his son’s birthday. But the airbus scheduled to fly to Skardu was also cancelled at the last minute.

“I’ve already spent Rs8,500 on a PIA ticket,” he said, adding that now he would have to catch a flight next week.

But no matter how bad things were for those travelling by PIA, other airlines seemed to be making hay. “You can get a ticket to Lahore or Karachi from other private airlines for an extra Rs2,000,” Mohammad Sagheer, a travel agent, told Dawn.

He said that due to the cancellation of PIA flights, many people had opted to fly these private airlines, which were only too happy to offers seats after bumping up the airfare in view of the increased demand.

Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) Spokesperson Pervez George told Dawn that CAA Director General Amjad Ali Toor had called a meeting with representatives of Airblue and Shaheen Airlines in Karachi to inquire about the increase in their airfares.

“Representatives of both airlines made it clear that a revenue management system is applicable to fares and because most people are purchasing tickets right before departure, some of them have to pay extra as per policy. The airlines insist that they have increased their fares,” he said.

The crisis also attracted the attention of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who took serious notice of the sudden and unjustified increase in private airlines’ fares.

According to a statement from the PM House, PM Sharif was quite angry over the unauthorised increases that were causing problems for travellers.

He also instructed the concerned departments to conduct an inquiry and rescind any increase in fare within 48 hours.

Deadlocked

After talks between Palpa and the national flag carrier failed to reach an outcome, Palpa President Amir Hashmi told Dawn that the a status quo will be maintained with regards to flight operations until the association’s demands were accepted.

He insisted that this action was not a “strike”, rather, the pilots had opted to “go by the book”. However, he claimed that neither PIA management, nor PM’s Adviser on Aviation Shujaat Azeem seemed interested in resolving this issue.

“They have their own vested interests [in] private airlines and are creating problems for pilots. We have made it clear that pilots will not do any extra duty, except for Haj flights,” he said.

He said that CAA’s management wanted to run the body according to their own whims, without any approval from the federal cabinet. “The PIA management did not come to the negotiation table and Palpa is not interested in talking to Mr Azeem, whose position has already been challenged in the Supreme Court,” he said.

However, PIA Spokesperson Amir Memon told Dawn that Palpa was offered a solution, whereby a team consisting of four senior PIA pilots and four Palpa representatives may be constituted, along with two observers from the PIA management. This team would formulate a future course of action to resolve all the issues between the PIA management and Palpa.

Unfortunately, he said that Palpa had refused to budge and had instead insisted on their demands being met forthwith. This inflexibility was inconveniencing passengers and inflicting unnecessary financial and losses on the national carrier, he claimed.

Background

When asked what the dispute between Palpa and the PIA management stemmed from, CAA spokesman Pervez George said that the issue arose when two pilots, Captain Zahid Rehman Bharoola and Captain Iftikhar Kaleem Khan, along with their flight officer, were supposed to fly PK 755 from Sialkot to Riyadh, on June 3.

Before the flight’s scheduled departure time of 6:15am, Captain Bharoola informed PIA that he could not fly the plane unless the management give him an additional flight officer. The management and the captain went back and forth over this for around nine hours, after which the management told the pilot to proceed to Karachi, where the whole crew would be changed. However, the pilot proceeded to Riyadh without permission from PIA and clocked 19 hours on this duty, as against a limit of 10 hours.

He said that CAA issued show cause notices to these pilots but they did not appear in person before the CAA and were finally sent legal notices, cancelling their licences for two years.

He said that the pilots were found in deliberate violation of flight safety procedures and had disregarded CAA rules and regulations. A formal investigation was carried out, which revealed that the cockpit crew had deliberately violated safety regulations on Palpa’s directives.

Published in Dawn, October 6th, 2015

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