Fully booked return flight
Shabahat Ali Shah is the CEO and chairman of the National Information Technology Board (NITB) of Pakistan. Discussion has started on Twitter after one of his photographs. Ali Shah was traveling from Istanbul in Turkey to Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan. But the flight he was coming from was completely empty. Ali Shah tweeted the photo and wrote, ‘Empty flight from Istanbul to Islamabad. I am the only one in the cabin. The same flight used to be full till a year ago and even there was no space available in the waiting list. What has happened?’
In response to another tweet, Ali Shah told that the flight attendants have informed him that this flight will return to Istanbul completely full. After this some people wrote to him in reply that it seems people want to go out of Pakistan but do not want to come back to this country.
IATA gave the warning
On behalf of the International Air Transport Association (IATA), it was warned a few days ago that the coming time for foreign airlines in Pakistan under the burden of debt could be very challenging. According to the organization, 290 million dollars are stuck in different parts of the country. This figure was three times more than in December 2021. It was said by the association that after Nigeria, Pakistan was the second country where a large amount of foreign money is stuck. A report quoted IATA’s Asia Pacific head Philip Goh as saying that airlines are facing delays before getting their funds back.
difficult to get stuck funds
Goh said that the money of some airlines is stuck in Pakistan since the year 2022. IATA had said in December 2022 that Pakistan had stopped payment of USD 225 million due to international airlines. In the year 2019, the condition of Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) was revealed in an audit report. It was said in this audit report that PIA has been operating 46 flights without any passengers since the year 2016-2017. Because of this, he had a loss of $ 1.1 million.