Pak\u00adistan International Airlines (PIA) finally resumed flights to Europe on Friday, after a four-and-a-half-year ban was lifted by EU regulators.<\/p>\n
A flight of the state-owned airline, plagued by a history of deadly crashes and a pilot licence scandal, took off from Islamabad at around 12:40pm heading for Paris, AFP journalists saw, becoming the only carrier to offer a direct route to and from the European Union.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is the first time I am travelling with PIA,\u201d said passenger Shumaila Rana, a 38-year-old school teacher living in Germany. \u201cI\u2019m nervous and I\u2019m having a lot of anxiety, but I\u2019m hoping it\u2019s gonna be a good flight.\u201d<\/p>\n
Debt-ridden PIA was banned in June 2020 from flying to the European Union, United Kingdom and the United States, a month after one of its Airbus A-320s plunged into Karachi\u2019s Model Colony, killing nearly 100 people.<\/p>\n
The disaster was attributed to human error by the pilots and air traffic control, and was followed by allegations that nearly a third of the licences for its pilots were fake or dubious.<\/p>\n
In 2016, a PIA plane burst into flames after one of its two turboprop engines failed during a flight from Chitral to Islamabad, killing more than 40 people.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Pak\u00adistan International Airlines (PIA) finally resumed flights to Europe on Friday, after a four-and-a-half-year ban was lifted by EU regulators. A flight of the state-owned airline, plagued by a history of deadly crashes and a pilot licence scandal, took off from Islamabad at around 12:40pm heading for Paris, AFP journalists saw, becoming the only carrier […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4585,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4584","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-national-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4584","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4584"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4584\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4586,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4584\/revisions\/4586"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}