Ops-Normal.org

The mention of AI and PIA above got one to reminiscing.

A few years ago I am running the Line Engineering shift at Manchester, we've done the morning departures and are just waiting for the PIA KHI-MAN-KHI, it's running about 14hrs late and stands a good chance of severely upsetting lunch. The canteen will close.

11:30 and there is an explosive arrival, a tyre burst on landing, a glance out of the window reveals a green and white 747-2 getting to the end of the runway. I send half the shift, including my best man while the others go to the canteen.

My lad is soon back, wheel change, it has a hole you can get your head into, we have no serviceable spare but there should be two in the “Flight Spares” in the hold. When we can get to them we find they are both used and un-labled.
Now we have the clash of cultures, legally we can't fit and certify an un-identified wheel.
The Station Manager starts to get agitated and demands. My lad refuses. An impasse, eventually we compromise, we will fit the wheel and the Flight Engineer will certify it. (he doesn't know this yet as the new crew are still to arrive)

The lads continue to try fixing the cabin and the broken seats with wire, tape and superglue, I am called to the aircraft by my lad who sounds in some form of distress. He is having a real go with the Station Manager who is quite agitated and waving some sort of Cabin Defects Log. It is written in Urdu, but when we get him down to earth the Manager explains that the upper deck toilet is U/S and he has some important pax travelling on the Upper Deck. He wants it fixed.
Neil is still fairly distressed. “Wod will you explain to the little Fu#ker that I can't fix the fu#kin toilet 'cos it's not fuc#in' there” and so it wasn't just a hole and an electrical connector.

We had some fun with PIA.

Please Inform Allah
(No, he doesn't want to know.)

I've never travelled with PIA, but I have suffered them!

Back as far as 1959, when 214 Sqdn based tankers at Mauripur, on our departure, our catering was supplied by PIA.

They made us look forward to what was supplied by RAF Khormaksar on the next leg.

PIA again.
http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/boeing-passenger-jet-five-hour-9298695

Don't worry, they're looking at buying A350 and B787 aircraft!

Dont' worry me Capes, I have seen much and I will never ever be boarding one of their Aircraft dead or alive.

"Great people to fly with" according to the side of their aircraft. Wouldn't touch them with a ten foot pole meself

A friend of mine who was really tightfisted flew on them to Bangkok. It was about £50 cheaper than the next alternative, which would have been Scareoflot.

The next trip was on Scareoflot.

I didn't mind Scarealot when I flew 'em to Moskva from Singapore during my youth huge lumps of yonks ago. Da - twas more of an adventure tovarich than a trip in all respects!

Sounds a lot like IranAir back in the late '60's. Working as a Field Eng for RCA based in Sunbury, and we used to get AVQ10 weather radar transmitters in from their 707's. The Tx's needed to be close to the dish antenna in the nose, so suspect they were mounted in a rack directly under the pilots feet.

Whenever we got a Tx from IranAir the first thing our people would do was to take it out the back and hose it down. God knows what the rest of the a/c was like, but these units were filthy.

Alison

When you are in Peshawar and the options are PIA or a 'fast taxi' to Islamabad it is not a hard decision to make.

Another one very similar is Biman Bangladesh, I was unfortunate enough to fly with them for a year on the DC10-30.

Their engineering was excellent. Their crews less so - the levels of over-confidence and complacency were stunning.

If anyone's interested, I can send them the report I wrote for the Bangladesh CAA (who are complicit) and the UK CAA who banned Biman for many months shortly afterwards.

Brian W May wrote: ↑

Sat May 19, 2018 7:23 pm

If anyone's interested, I can send them the report I wrote for the Bangladesh CAA (who are complicit) and the UK CAA who banned Biman for many months shortly afterwards.

I am interested and I would really read carefully the report.

Rwy in Sight - see your PMs

Rwy in Sight.

Now you've read it all, what do you think?

I am about to cat-sit in my sister's place and since her cats ignore me it would make a good read. I will late you know later today.

That's spooky as I'm cat-sitting my daughter's cats . . .

She has three cats, one of them earned me air miles. She is away for the weekend so I enjoy her apartment. Unfortunately no beer is stocked this time.

I hope your daughter's cat behave better than one of my sister's one who stayed under the bed all the time I am here.

I read the report. The pride before safety was more shocking. When politics enter the flight deck is scary. Glad you got out of there ok.

In the early sixties i was joining a ship in the Persian Gulf,when i received my flight tickets i was disappointed to find i was flying PIA to Dharan. Leaving Heathrow the pilot was American, after a stop at Instabul the new pilot was Pakistani. We arrived overhead Kuwait at a great hight and then proceeded to do tight descending turns prior to landing at Kuwait. I was told later that the pilot was either doing an emergency descent or practicing one!! We were due to get off in Dharan which was the next stop but were told that because of a sand storm in Dharan we would all be going to Karachi,this caused a bit of an argument because a lot of the remains passengers were leaving at Dharan. An American passenger told the Captain that if we all got off in Kuwait their were three flights the next morning to Dharan so they could transfer us to one of them, this was a problem to PIA but suddenly we were told that the sand storm had lifted and we were now going to Dharan as scheduled. Everyone sat down and we departed, i doubt if the aircraft had even got the wheels up when a new report said the sand storm had come down and we would be going direct to Karachi.At Karachi we were put in a hotel, after an argument to get somewhere decent, and told we would be flown back to Dharan in three days time. About nine of us were joining the ship so the Company decided to hold it until we arrived. The next morning we were all put on the shake at 0330 and told we were going to Dharan at 0800, we arrived at the airport and i couldn't see any flights to Dharan but PIA were in the process of checking us in. Upon enquiry we were told that they had a flight to Jeddah and we could make our own way to Dharan from there. After a bit of a standoff it was back to the hotel, another argument to get our rooms back and we stayed until the original flight was ready after three days. We eventually arrived in Dharan, joined our ship and that was that,
I have never been back to Pakistan,never been on another PIA flight and i am quite confident that i never will again.