Shameful attitude

PIA is a statutory body created to serve revenue paying passengers with safe reliable travel and carriage of cargo, and not as a job provider for political cronies or retired and serving officers nor corrupt bureaucrats, who over the past five decades have driven it to insolvency, plagued by frequent fatal accidents with an incompetent regulator like CAA making it worse. Air crashes are a collateral part of commercial aviation and occur due to a combination of pilot error, technical problems and regulatory deficiencies. In the event of a crash, airline executives are supposed to rise to the occasion and be compassionate, humble, apologetic and helpful to the next of kin of the dead – not add to their woes by shouting at them. The video recorded account of the ordeal faced by Al Yaseen Ali, a 32-year-old American of Lebanese origin is heart shattering and shameful for those at helm of affairs in the aviation ministry, PIA and the CAA.

Why cannot those at the helm speak the truth? After all. state functionaries exist to serve and protect people, not add to their woes. Yaseen states that he was given false information. The irony is that Yaseen nostalgically quotes his late father “This land is majestic, this country shines with beauty and the Pakistani people are priceless, but they don’t know it, because they have been lied to for so long”.

Malik Tariq Ali

Lahore