PIA to undergo EASA audit to determine whether EU operations will restart

LAHORE: The European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) is scheduled to conduct a remote safety audit of the Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) and Pakistan Civil Aviation Authority CAA (PCAA) on March 7. The audit will determine the airworthiness of PIA, and whether it will regain access to European airspace. 

The European Union Aviation Safety Agency is an agency of the European Union with responsibility for civil aviation safety. It carries out certification, regulation and standardisation and also performs investigation and monitoring. A successful audit would allow PIA to restart flights to the EU, but not the UK. 

“EASA and the UK’s Department for Transport are two separate bodies. Both have been approached separately” says Abdullah Hafeez Khan, PIA’s Spokesperson. 

“We are very confident. We have consistently cleared it,” said Khan. “Normally these things take weeks, but on successful audit, a team will visit to physically verify their findings,” said Khan when Profit asked when PIA would receive a verdict following the audit. 

“Market size in terms of revenue now stands at Rs 50 Billion plus while in terms of percentage, we would be looking at regaining the lost 40% that we had” Khan continued when Profit asked how much PIA would stand to gain if the audit were to be successful. 

The company ended Q3CY22 with a net loss of Rs25 billion which increased their accumulated net loss for the year to a total of Rs 67 billion. This is a 58 per cent year-on-year increase from its accumulated loss of Rs 42.7 billion over the same period last year. 

PIA’s current stop gap mechanism for EU bound flights 

PIA currently serves destinations in the European Union alongside, the UK, and the USA through a code-sharing mechanism with Turkish Airlines. PIA fly’s passengers directly to its counterpart’s hub in Istanbul, and then to twenty-eight destinations across the aforementioned markets. The mechanism is currently a means for PIA to maintain routes it had been cordoned off from after the fake degree scandal.

The arrangement was announced on October 28 with the two countries celebrating 75 years of international relations with first flight commencing on November 15, 2022. It  came at the backdrop of PIA still suffering from the ramifications of its licence issue dating back to the crash of Flight 8303 on 22 May 2020 after which, then Federal Minister for Aviation, Ghulam Sarwar Khan alleged that 150 pilots had fake licences. This, subsequently, led to the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) implementing a ban on the carrier, with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in the US, and the Department of Transport in the UK following suit with a similar restriction.