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A Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) flight from Karachi to Islamabad made a 'dip' at Sukkur on Saturday to pick up passengers in the absence of ATR planes that usually fly on that route. The airline earlier this week grounded all ATR planes in its fleet for examination.
"As ATRs are grounded, PIA had planned a dip at Sukkur to facilitate Sukkur-Islamabad passengers," PIA spokesman Danyal Gilani said in a statement.
The stopover of PK-368 "was planned ahead of time and all passengers were duly informed on the contact numbers they had given at the time of reservation", said the statement.
Because of the pit stop, the PIA flight which was scheduled to land at 12:55pm landed in the capital at 2:31pm.
PIA decided to ground all 10 ATR planes in its fleet on Monday after a decision by the Civil Aviation Authority to hold shakedown tests of the aircraft.
A day earlier, an ATR-42 flight of PIA grabbed headlines when its pilot aborted the take-off of the Multan-Karachi flight. The plane, carrying 48 people, was grounded because of some fault in one of its engines.
That incident had come five days after a PIA ATR aircraft went down near Havelian killing all 47 people on board.
Comments (16) Closed
Even though the passengers have been complaining that they paid for a direct flight, it was never scheduled to make a stop over at Sukkur, it only did so due to behest of Khurshid Shah and Manzoor Wassan. Nice way to cover it up, filling the ATR gaps or fulfilling the desires of Shah?
What happening in PIA it need to be overhauled, Engineering department must check all flight very carefully, therefore its need check all flight P&P manual maintained.
Nobody wishes to work in PIA. Ground whole PIA once for all.
PIA need to privatized local and International two separate airlines, competition created, it is understand able that employees are not working, and taking care, therefore more international airlines given rights, local also given some foreign companies, free sky policies adopted. We can not spare lives of our Pak national on the mercy of PIA.
The deep-rooted corruption, lack of safety standards, mismanagement, incompetence and nepotism in PIA have turned its aircrafts into flying coffins.
We should make organisation independent of government pressure.
Privatize it!
I will NEVER put my family in danger. Bye bye PIA (and Shaheen).
The PIA plane which fly's to and from Lahore/Islamabad to Oslo/Copenhagen is so old and badly maintained that the entertainment systestem and flight attendant call buttons don't even work for all passanger seats. Not even enough blankets for half the passangers. The in-flight personall are on top of it rude, oversmart and too old for their jobs.
I fail to understand what makes PIA "great people to fly with".
(Note: I fly all the time within and between Europe, America and Asia).
the people flying on PIA are surely very gutsy because you need to have guts to carry such a heavy luggage of uncalculated risk.
Shame on PIA, and salute the courage of people who fly it.
I won't be surprised if PIA makes a pit stop so the pilot can pick up some Multani halwa from Multan next time.
Tell me readers have you ever heard such a story about any other airline, ever.
Can PIA buy or lease small two engine jets like Embraer ERJ175 and replace ATR propeller planes. They are larger then ATR planes with more passenger capacity and perhaps more efficient.
Under the prevailing circumstances, what other options do they have?
@tr true, very true, but the keyword here is maintenance. Even if you buy a Rolls Royce if you don't maintain it, it will end up in the junkyard.
I had a reservation for this flight as well, only to get a call a day before that the flight has been cancelled. My wife and I, both, had made separate reservations for this flight and neither of us were informed of this stop gap measure by PIA.