Daily Times

Dying in the air has always had more grief attached to it than dying on the ground. The numbers of people dying in various forms of tragedy are so many that they rarely make big news. Yet when an air crash happens, it still manages to shock a nation used to hundreds of deaths frequently. The fact that more than 350 people died of dengue last summer and another 150 in the PIC scandal seems to be overshadowed by a plane crash tragedy. The reason as they say is that in a plane crash it is an instantaneous and absolutely certain death. There are no survivors and the post-crash process of identifying dead bodies is in itself a horrific experience. In other tragedies, the chances of survival may still be there. Compare the air crash with the snow avalanche at Siachen burying 138 army and civilian personnel. While the air crash is a closed chapter, at Siachen there is still a fading hope of finding some survivors even after a period of two weeks. That is why all over the world air crashes get more attention, despite the fact that as a whole, the number of people killed in other types of crashes and accidents far exceed the number of people killed in air tragedies.

Air crashes in Pakistan have assumed horrible proportions. Firstly, having three crashes in a matter of two years is one too many. Secondly, no clue to as to why they happened has so far been determined. The easiest man to blame is the pilot and since he is dead, along with him goes the evidence. Black boxes are supposed to be hoarders of secret information and indestructible. However, either they are never discovered or their findings are never revealed. The Airblue tragedy last year was also blamed on having a retired pilot losing his head or sight and crashing into Margalla Hills and the deceased pilot of the Bhoja flight is also being assessed with the same yardstick. There are enquiries and promises of nailing the culprits but true to our tradition, time is the only healer for people in grief. After the outcry over the Bhoja crash, the Airblue administration has finally shared the last conversation of the pilot and first officer in the crash last year that reveals sheer arrogance in the cockpit being the root cause. Why they hid it from the public until now is confounding.
The primary reaction by all institutions involved is denial and reactivity. The blame game starts with finger pointing in all directions but at themselves. The government blames the opposition as in the case of Rehman Malik saying that the Nawaz Sharif government issued the certificate for Bhoja airline a decade ago. The opposition blames the government and the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA). While this bickering is going on, the ground operation of clearing the debris and remains of the unfortunate bodies became a symbol of the callousness of the CAA or the Disaster Management Authority or God really knows who.
The private airline business picked up in the 1990s during Nawaz Sharif’s regime when he announced the open sky policy for providing people with an alternative to PIA. The industry saw a surge of airlines entering the industry. Aero Asia, Shaheen Air and Airblue were the prominent ones, and Raji, Bhoja and Hajveri the lesser-known ones. The competitive strategy for most of the second tier airlines was to compete on price and emulate the low budget airline industry of the US and Europe where airlines like Ryan Air, Value Jet and South West Airlines have completely changed the dynamics of airlines being more expensive than other modes of transport. In fact, South West Airlines used to claim that its prices were lower than the railway and your own car. Following this pattern, Aero Asia and Bhoja claimed almost 50 percent less fare than PIA. Airblue did not compete on price but on punctuality and more friendly service. However, the low budget airlines like Aero Asia and Bhoja found it very difficult to sustain costs with these lower prices. Their service standards and punctuality declined to such an extent that despite their lower cost, travelling in them became too much of an uncertainty. While the costs piled up, they started defaulting on payments and safety standards, and thus, Bhoja earlier and Aero Asia a little later were grounded.
The CAA is a subset of a government-run organisation. Experience notwithstanding, is it motivated to do stringent tests of safety and standards? Does it really have power to reject pressures from a higher authority? Does it have the ability to see not only the technical sustainability but also the strategic viability of the applying airlines to survive in the market competition? These question marks have gone unanswered for a long time. With PIA also being banned from certain European routes due to poor adherence to safety standards, the role and responsibility of the CAA needs to be clarified, broadened and redefined. However, this is only possible if the bosses of the CAA are also answerable for their performance. In a blame-game culture, nobody is responsible for anything and that is why right from the prime minister to the man sitting on the counter, the shrug of the shoulders explains any default in standards and regulations. The easiest step taken by the government is to declare compensation money for the deceased. However, the major required investment is not to pay ‘hush or heal’ money to the unfortunate people who have lost their loved ones in this tragedy but to really determine where the gaps lie in a system that has started falling apart. A partial airplane inspection before takeoff is not the answer. A complete revamping of procedures of monitoring and evaluation are imperative.
However, like all debates that we have had on massive failures in the recent past, the buck stops at the follies of the human intent. To make institutions viable and accountable, you need to make people operating them focused and committed to the cause. The recent blast at the Lahore Railway Station is another example of the absence of any monitoring equipment or procedure being in place to determine the real cause of the blast. It is almost inevitable that with an embedded culture of apathy prevailing from top to bottom, the area of disaster management will continue to produce disastrous shows of management.

The writer is an analyst, consultant and information Secretary of PTI Punjab and can be reached at andleeb.abbas1@gmail.com