Pakistan

Are overage pilots safe?

Shahzad Khalil August 07, 2010

SIALKOT: This is with reference to your coverage of the Airblue plane crash and a front page report on August 6 which said that PIA was planning to rehire pilots who had already retired. On the one hand, PIA pilots get tax-free allowances and on the other hand the management wants to rehire retired pilots older than 60 years but not yet reached 65. Is the CAA aware that countries like France, Hungary and Italy impose restrictions on pilots from flying their country's registered aircraft beyond the age of 60 or 62? The current PPP government gets the cake for defying logic, sacrificing national interest and now the safety of passengers, just because it wants to stand by its cronies.

The national age of retirement is based on the medical health of the population, their access to clean water and unadulterated food, the average life expectancy age and the need to provide jobs to those who are entering the job market for the first time. There is no rocket science involved in training pilots to fly commercial aircraft. What we need is for institutions like PIA to salvage their already-low credibility instead of politicising the matter and making a mockery of the rules and ground realities.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 8^th, 2010.

COMMENTS (3)

Mir Tassadaq | 14 years ago | Reply We are talikng of a country where degrees are fake and even the elected govt and its Min of Education or Min of Law are not bothered about this forgery. What can be the authenticity of the age submitted by our pilots and their verification by PIA or CAA and Air Blue. There have been many instances where senior executives of PIA and even pilots in the past have resubmitted their age certificates which were in variance with what was submitted earlier. As far as USA is concerned their national retirement age for Federal Govt is 67 years and pilots are normally not allowed to fly commercial passenger flights above 60 years. Those allowed above 60 yrs to fly uptil 65 years have to undergo strict medical and psychiatric evaluation. 65 years restriction in age for pilots is well below the US national retirement age. Even in Europe countries like France do not allow their own pilots to fly French registered passenger aircrafts above 60 years, although their country retirement age is more than 65 years. The issue is not rehabilitation of retd pilots, but flight safety and CAA's poor past record of regulation. No civil aviation regulatory body in Europe or US allows pilots to fly with an overage waiver, if they have an existing medical waiver. Our expats do not know the ground realities in Pakistan, because they by choice do not live here.

Shahzad | 14 years ago | Reply Can Mr Meekal let me know whether existing medical facilities available in Pakistan and quality of research in medicine match those that exist in UK or USA. How many times has he gone for medical treatment by choice in Pakistan?. The Air Blue pilot was very experienced. He is reported to be a severe diabetic, with hyper tension. Yet inspite of all these disabilities, which deteriorate with age, he was granted permission to fly by CAA. Mr Meekal is aware of the fact that the national age of retirement in USA is above 65 years. This age depends on local factors like health, avarage life expectancy and other environmental factors. No country in Europe or on the American continent, allows its pilots to fly beyond the national age of retirement. As far as shortages of pilots in PIA are concerned, there is none. If PIA were to make public the total number of pilots on their payroll, and divide that by the number of available airworthy aircrafts, excluding those grounded for more than 6 months, than the point that this is an artificially created shortage will be evident. This newspaper in its first report on the Air Blue crash highlighted this aspect as far as PIA is concerned. It should not be our destiny to ignore realities. I am sure Mr Meekal is aware that in Pakistan, pilots get tax free allowances, based on the grounds of Paris Artist Convention, which basically is that the artists have a short and undetermined earning tenure. Here the pilots want to be rehired beyond 60, when others doing ground jobs in PIA or Airblue get retired at 60 years. Moreover the quality of regulation and checks carried out by FAA cannot be compared with the regulation of CAA. If it were the same, than diabetics with known hypertension or cardiac problems, pilots with severe hearing disabilities etc, would not have been allowed to fly beyond 60 in Pakistan.

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Meekal Ahmed | 14 years ago | Reply I wonder if you are aware of the fact that in the US with the strongest regulatory systems in aviation now allow pilots to fly till 65. There is no such thing as an 'old' pilot provided he can pass his physical exam every six months and recurrent training every six months on simulators where every kind of emergency is thrown at him/her. This profession the world over is the most rigorously tested and re-tested and trained and re-trained. No other profession compares. If PIA is re-hiring those who retired under the rule of 60, it means that younger pilots are not yet fit in terms of flying hours required to man the cockpit of their jumbo's. They may be young and sharp but they are also required to have a certain amount of flying hours before they move up. If that is not the case, then yes, the younger pilots are getting a bad deal. But we don't know if this is the case. There may be 'no rocket-science in training pilots' but it needs an aptitute for flying. Not everyone has that. Provided these 'old' pilot are correctly paired on the flight deck with younger but experienced co-pilots, there is no risk involved. If anything, having someone in command of an aircraft with thousands of hours augments safety. Yet as the Airblue crash has shown accidents can still happen to the best and the longest-serving. Commerical flying is very safe. But flying, like the ocean, is terribly unforgiving of mistakes.

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