7000 PIA employees will be voluntarily laid off: Ghulam Sarwar Khan

ISLAMABAD: Federal aviation minister Ghulam Sarwar Khan said Tuesday the Civil Aviation Authority of Pakistan will satisfactorily compensate Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) employees being laid off voluntarily, ARY News reported.

Federal Minister Ghulam Sarwar said while PIA requires only seven thousand employees to operate, it employs over 14,000 currently due to the politically influenced recruitments in the past by ruling parties.

He said out of 14,000 currently employed, half will have to be let go of via Voluntary Separation Scheme (VSS) and those will be compensated.

On the case of suspicious licenses of 262 pilots, he said no misinformation was transmitted on this matter while an inquiry was also initiated which found 82 of them proven to be involved. He said that those who came clean in the inquiries got clearance certificates as well.

Whatever we did we did it in the national interest, he said and claimed that nothing wrong was committed in the process.

READ: Probe report holds ‘PIA engineers’ responsible for Havelian plane crash

About the vacant Director General CAA post, he said that the court has ruled that appointment has to be materialized and we will comply.

He said that about 600 candidates applied for the post out of which 18 were initially shortlisted, but even the shortlisted ones failed to fulfil our standards.

In separate development recently, it was told that the Aircraft Accident Investigation Board of Pakistan tasked to probe into the PIA plane crash near Havilian in 2016 has released its inquiry report and held PIA engineers responsible for the crash.

A fractured turbine blade triggered a “complicated” sequence of failures that culminated in the fatal Havelian PIA crash in 2016, the Aircraft Accident Investigation Board of Pakistan has said in a report.