KARACHI:
Nadeem Khan Yousafzai, Managing Director of Pakistan International Airlines and a serving pilot, was reappointed on Saturday as Director General of Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), television channels reported.
Yousafzai has replaced current CAA DG Air Marshal (retd) Khalid Chaudhry.
CAA spokesman could not confirm the appointment immediately while the new DG could not be reached for comments.
PIA spokesman also could not confirm the development, saying no notification had been issued because of Saturday being an official holiday.
Yousafzai, who was appointed managing director of cash-strapped PIA in February 2011, has also headed CAA for some time in the past.
However, his appointment has raised questions about impartiality of the regulator. CAA has had a thorny relationship with PIA considering the airline’s poor maintenance track record and recurring engineering faults.
Former CAA DG Junaid Amin commented that an operator could never be the regulator. “This is absolutely wrong. CAA checks pilots and deals with aircraft maintenance. It often penalises the airline. With a PIA man at the top, it won’t be easy for CAA now.”
Being a captain, Yousafzai regularly takes flights both on domestic and international routes. It is not clear if he will continue to do that as CAA DG. But during his last tenure in CAA in 2010, he kept flying planes.
Amin said it would be challenging for Yousafzai to remain impartial when it came to grounding of old and faulty PIA aircraft. “The 737s are in bad shape. We had grounded them earlier because of technical problems.”
Airport managers have powers of judicial magistrate, allowing them authority to restrict the pilot who is sick or under the influence of alcohol, he said. “An unfit pilot can be a serious safety hazard. Who will dare stop a sitting CAA DG?”
Published in The Express Tribune, March 25th, 2012.
COMMENTS (2)
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I agree that having a PIA pilot occupying the top position in a regulatory agency is deeply conflicting in terms of interest.
PIA pilots have served as CAA check airmen. But they had retired from PIA.
I am not aware of the 737s being "grounded". That is is very strong term. The last grounding was of the PIA DC-10 fleet but that was a world-wide grounding irrespective of the airline following the horrific crash of a Turkish Airlines DC-10 climbing out of Paris when it's rear cargo door blew off.
It is another matter that the 737s were in for scheduled "C" checks which takes several weeks to complete.
It seems that someone takes a look at the aircraft parked at the maintenance base in Karachi, counts them and then writes a report on how many are "grounded".
This looks very much like ' let's keep it all in the family ' because daddy wants it so.