KARACHI, March 14: The Pakistan International Airlines and the Civil Aviation Authority were well-aware of serious lapses found by a European Union (EU) inspection team in flight operations, flight safety, engineering and maintenance during its three-day visit to all core operational safety areas, claimed well-placed sources in the airline.

The sources told Dawn that the visit of the EU team aimed at verifying implementation of PIA’s Corrective Action Plan and after witnessing several lapses, the team hinted to both the CAA and the PIA that on the basis of their findings the EU may restrict most of the national carrier’s aircraft for failing to meet EU-SAFA safety standards.

A confidential document sent to the Chairman PIA from head of Quality Assurance said that the EU inspectors cited several examples to show improperly conducted routine aircraft defect rectification still being performed by Line Maintenance. “Aircrew was reporting running Skydrol leakage from one of the Boeing-777 PCUs. This defect had not been cleared for over a month by the engineering staff and was continuously being written off the aircraft technical logbook as ‘leak checked: Found within limits’.”

In another case an A310 aircraft had a multiple repeated series of problems with its landing gear extension/retraction mechanism using the main Hydraulic system. Alternate hydraulic system which is an emergency backup system only was being used by aircrew for more than 15 days which constituted serious safety hazard.

The EU team inspected a Boeing 747, which had repeatedly reported problems of “aircraft pulling to the left during taxi”. This defect was reported several times for more than one week. Each time short cut maintenance work was done without performing the systematic series of checks as required by the Aircraft Maintenance Manual.

In the fourth example, the EU team told the PIA and CAA that a PIA aircraft had to be switched off during departure start-up due to sticky flight controls movement problem. However, this snag was summarily cleared as “Snag could be not duplicated on ground. Operation checked found Sat (satisfactory)”. The complete sequel of required maintenance checks mandatory to be performed in the case of critical system like flight control was just ignored. These actions indicated that there is no specific direction, monitoring or control for dealing with repeated defects and for referral to technical manuals in serious situations.

The EU team showed their concern on management of Maintenance Reliability Programme, which was non-existent till six months back and was recently started after a three-year gap.

Mr Kirmani was also informed that the EU team observed that the Engineering Quality Assurance procedure look very good on papers but its effectiveness in actually improving the quality and safety standards of aircraft maintenance was unsatisfactory.

Some aircraft engineers requesting anonymity told Dawn that many times they were directed to release the aircraft despite the fact that they were not safe according to EU standards.

They said after the ban, the top authorities of the airline blamed the engineers for the EU ban and posted junior and non-professional staff to hide their own failure.

This has caused resentment among the aircraft engineers, who have started a protest campaign against the airline management these days.