Delegates from the U.K.’s Department of Transportation and Civil Aviation Authority have arrived in Pakistan this week to discuss resuming flights of Pakistan’s flag carrier, Pakistan International Airlines (PIA), to London.
The move comes just under three weeks after PIA resumed flights to Paris, marking the end of a four-year-long hiatus. This was due to safety concerns, with the EASA, the European Aviation Safety Agency, having suspended the ban on flying over its airspace.
According to Arab News, the U.K.’s team is in the South-Asian nation’s largest city, Karachi, to determine whether they deem the Pakistani Civil Aviation Authority’s (PCAA) safety standards as being fit to resume flights.
The ban originally came into effect in 2020 in the wake of a PIA Airbus A320 crashing into a Karachi suburb, leaving 97 passengers dead and a further eight on the ground. Following the crash, an investigation raised concerns regarding the validity of several Pakistani pilot’s licenses, and so PIA was banned from flying to, from, or over European Union and British airspace.
Over the four years, the ban was in effect, the PCAA grounded 262 pilots, a move that the EASA deemed acceptable in order to pause the ban.
According to Flightradar24, only one airline currently flies non-stop between the U.K. and Pakistan. British Airways operates flights between the capitals of both Pakistan and the U.K., London and Islamabad, using a Boeing 777-200.
