The headline that Pakistan International Airlines and Airblue have been cleared to resume European services is attractive. It is also premature as of the record of progress available through official EU scrutiny and public reporting up to July 23, 2024. What we actually have by that date is a technically rigorous EASA-led process that has forced concrete corrective actions from the Pakistan Civil Aviation Authority but has not yet removed Pakistani carriers from the EU’s operating restrictions.
Context matters. The EU suspension of PIA’s Third Country Operator privileges traces back to the aftermath of the 2020 Karachi accident and the subsequent controversy over pilot licensing and oversight. That chain of events put Pakistan’s safety oversight under unusually intense international scrutiny and prompted the EU to conduct an on-site assessment of the Pakistan Civil Aviation Authority and sample assessments of carriers including Airblue and Fly Jinnah.
What EASA and the Commission did right was to insist on evidence not promises. The on-site visit in late November 2023 identified organizational and procedural shortcomings in PCAA’s oversight, notably shortcomings in closure practices, deviations from established procedures and a severe understaffing of the Flight Standards Directorate. The PCAA responded with a Corrective Action Plan delivered on May 6, 2024 and then answered questions at a hearing before the EU Air Safety Committee on May 14, 2024. The EU documentation records specific reforms: a reallocation of tasks, steps to improve the regulatory and procedural framework, the creation of central quality assurance structures and an increase in qualified inspectors for flight standards from a single inspector to the nineteen inspectors required by the revised task allocation. Those are measurable, structural improvements that reflect regulatory reform rather than superficial housekeeping.
Despite those steps, the EU Air Safety Committee concluded that, at the time of its June 2024 review, there were no sufficient grounds to amend the Air Safety List and lift the ban on carriers certified in Pakistan. The Committee emphasised the need for ongoing monitoring, regular technical meetings, and prioritised ramp inspections by Member States as implementation and verification tools. In short, the regulators have accepted the direction of travel but are requiring sustained, documented delivery before they change the risk posture for European airspace.
That posture is a feature, not a bug. A regulator’s job is to probabilistically reduce risk for the flying public. Lifting a ban prematurely on the basis of plans or political assurances would risk undoing the hard gating criteria that make the Air Safety List an effective nudge for national authorities to invest in oversight capacity. Where EASA and the Commission have succeeded is in converting international pressure into concrete, auditable actions inside the PCAA’s organisation. Those are the types of reforms that create long term resilience in safety oversight: defined quality assurance lines, documented closure of findings based on evidence, appropriate staffing profiles, and alignment of national rules with ICAO and EU-referenced standards.
Operationally for airlines the implications are straightforward. Passing an oversight test requires sustained compliance, not episodic fixes. Ramp inspections, records audits and verifiable staffing and training profiles must be sustained and transparent. Airlines seeking EU TCO authorisation must expect more than a single appearance before a committee. They must build audited chains of compliance into maintenance, crew training, operations control and safety management systems. For PIA and Airblue that means turning the CAP’s milestones into continuously demonstrable evidence, and allowing independent verification through ramp checks and third party audits.
Policy lessons for Pakistan are equally concrete. Regulatory independence and stability of leadership inside the civil aviation authority matter. So do clear, codified procedures for how findings are closed and verified. Quantity of inspectors without quality will not suffice; regulators must have competent, well trained inspectors with access to an independent quality assurance function so that closures are evidence based. Equally, governments must resist political expedients that conflate air service restoration with commercial or diplomatic gains. The EU’s approach demonstrates that credible oversight is a precondition for access, not a reward for restoration of routes.
If the objective is to restore connectivity while protecting passengers, Pakistan’s aviation sector should treat EASA’s ongoing oversight as an opportunity. The EU process has set clear markers: demonstrate implementation, enable independent verification, and institutionalize quality assurance. If those markers are met and sustained, the regulatory instruments that now constrain market access can be removed without undermining safety. Until then, claims that the ban has already been lifted risk confusing the public and undermining the very accountability that produced the corrective measures in the first place.
From a legal and policy perspective the EASA-led sequence to this point is a win for oversight. It shows how international regulatory mechanisms leverage both technical assessment and conditional engagement to drive reform. The bench test for success will not be a press conference or a political timetable. It will be demonstrable, repeatable, auditable evidence that the PCAA and Pakistani carriers have built and maintained the capabilities needed to meet international safety standards across time.