RAWALPINDI: Eleven Pakistani pilots associated with Vietnamese airlines have been cleared and the authorities have declared that all of them have valid and legitimate flying licences as the verification process moves ahead.

“We had received a request for 11 Pakistani pilots working in Vietnam for verification of their licences and all of them were cleared after scrutiny,” a senior aviation official told Dawn on Saturday.

News agency Reuters also ran a report on Saturday with Hanoi dateline quoting the Vietnamese government as saying that all the Pakistani pilots working for Vietnamese airlines have valid and legitimate licences and none has been involved in a flight incident or safety threat.

Vietnam last month grounded all Pakistani pilots working for the local airline amid concern from global regulators that some pilots may have been using dubious licences.

“All licences administered by the Pakistani aviation regulator are legitimate and valid. There are no fake licences, as mentioned by the media,” a Vietnamese government statement said, citing a note from the Pakistani Embassy to the Vietnamese government.

Of 176 Pakistani pilots engaged with different foreign airlines, licences of 166 have been verified

Vietnam had licensed a total of 27 Pakistani pilots and 12 of them were still active. The other 15 pilots’ contracts have expired or they were inactive due to the coronavirus pandemic, according to Vietnam’s Civil Aviation Authority.

Spokesman for Pakistan’s Aviation Division Abdul Sattar Khokhar, said Pakistan had received requests from 10 countries — Vietnam, Turkey, the UAE, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait, Ethiopia and Bahrain — for validation of credentials of 176 Pakistani pilots working in those countries.

Out of these 176 Pakistani pilots, he said, 166 had been verified by the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) as none of them was having any anomaly.

He said the process of verification of the remaining 10 licences was under way and it would be concluded by next week. He said the information regarding verification of 166 Pakistani pilots had been communicated to respective countries, including the Vietnam Civil Aviation Authority.

The controversy over the pilots’ licences issue surfaced when presenting the preliminary investigation report on the May 22 plane crash in Karachi on the floor of the National Assembly on June 24, Aviation Minister Ghulam Sarwar Khan said there were 860 active pilots in the country, and 262 of them had appeared in examinations through proxies. He had said almost 30 per cent of the pilots had fake or improper licenses and did not have flying experience either.

The minister’s statement alerted the international aviation agency and a number of foreign airlines grounded Pakistani-origin pilots. And on July 1, the European Union and UK authorities stopped PIA from flying to Europe for six months.

Since then, the government and the minister have been facing severe criticism from the opposition parties which allege that the minister has brought humiliation to the country at the international level by making such a disclosure on the floor of the parliament.

The minister, however, while responding to the opposition’s criticism in the National Assembly last week, downplayed the suspension of the PIA operations, terming it “temporary” and saying it was not for the first time that such a ban had been imposed on the national airline. He recalled that in the past on a number of occasions, the PIA had faced suspensions for not adhering to safety measures.

He said they were in contact with the concerned authorities in Europe, adding that the other countries would be satisfied when they would ‘clean’ the institutions of corruption.

About the problems being faced by Pakistani pilots working in other airlines, he said the government was in contact with the authorities and the foreign airlines had sent the lists of the pilots for verification. He said the UAE had sent a list of 54 pilots and they had already cleared 48 of them.

The opposition, however, called for the resignation of the minister when the CAA declared that all licences issued by it to the pilots “are genuine”.

During a meeting of the Senate Standing Committee on Aviation on Thursday, the minister not only defended his remarks, he almost repeated his speech which he had delivered on the floor of the National Assembly while presenting the inquiry report of the PIA plane crash. He, however, made one clarification and claimed that in his speech in the assembly he had declared the licences of the pilots “dubious” and not “fake.”

He said it might look as damaging for the country in short term but for the future it was important to show the world through actions that “we are improving our systems.”

Published in Dawn, July 19th, 2020