What caused the crash of PK 8303 is not clear and it will be many months before we get a full picture of what went wrong. In crashes like this which involve a catastrophic loss of life, airlines and regulators are keen to deflect blame from themselves and cast it on others. The easiest targets are the pilots. Dead men cannot defend themselves. And this is what will surely start to happen in this case if it has not started already.
As someone who has followed air crashes all around the world and read detailed air accident reports I have come to the conclusion that pilots are almost never to blame for a crash. In an unexpected emergency they have split seconds to make life or death decisions. It is a time when a lifetime of experience and training kicks in. What they decide to do may or may not save the aircraft. And even where an accident report includes the offensive term ‘pilot error’ as a factor in the crash, this takes nothing away from the actions or decisions of the pilot. In similar circumstances many highly experienced pilots may well have made the same decision.
Air accident reports sometimes conclude that ‘recovery was not possible’. In other words no matter what the pilot would have done he could not have saved the aircraft. There are cases where investigators conclude that recovery would have been possible if the pilots had made an alternative decision. But even in these cases the pilots cannot be faulted. They do not have the benefit of hindsight as the investigators do. To the pilots, at the time and place of their decision, it was the best decision to make.
All this is not to say that there is no one to blame. In some sense PK 8303 had crashed before it left the runway in Lahore. All the factors that would end the flight an hour or so later in Model Colony were already in place. There is never any single cause to an air crash. A sequence of events and circumstances cause an accident like this. Some of these are related to immediate issues such as the failure of the landing gear to deploy, forcing this aircraft to perform a go around.
One could choose to blame the maintenance engineers in Lahore for allowing the plane to leave the hangar with a faulty landing gear. But then one would have to ask why would experienced engineers and technicians release this aircraft for flight with faulty landing gear? Any investigation of the causes must examine all the data and actions leading up to this release. This chain of responsibility ultimately leads right to the top: The board of directors of PIA and its top management.
The late US President Harry Truman had a sign on his desk which read: “The buck stops here.” By this he meant that ultimate responsibility resides at the top
The late US President Harry Truman had a sign on his desk which read: “The buck stops here.” By this he meant that ultimate responsibility resides at the top. And this is where one must look to place blame: Have the board of directors of PIA created an environment and a culture that values safety above all other concerns? Have they ensured that all personnel associated with safety engineers, technicians, inspectors, pilots, check pilots meet international standards of training and experience? Have they created an environment in which it is easy for even the most junior technician to ‘pull the plug’ on a flight if he feels safety is compromised?
These and many, many more similar questions need to be put to the board. And any genuine investigation into the causes of the crash of PK 8303 must start with examining the qualifications of each and every director on the board of PIA. Do these people have the qualifications, experience and competence to run a large international airline? Or are most of them seconded from the Pakistan Administrative Services with zero training or knowledge of corporate management?
And of course the CEO must come in for special scrutiny in regards to his suitability and competence to run an airline. There is no doubt that Air Marshal Arshad Malik is a brilliant fighter pilot and officer. If this were not the case he would never have made Air Marshal. Yet, one must ask: How does this qualify him to be the Chief Executive of an airline?
The responsibility for the crash of PK 8303 rests squarely on the shoulders of these men and it is they who have to answer, with their heads if necessary, to the families who lost their loved ones and ultimately to the people of Pakistan.
Nadeem M Qureshi is Chairman of Mustaqbil Pakistan