The trifurcation of the Civil Aviation Authority into the Pakistan Civil Aviation Authority, the Bureau of Flight Safety Investigation and the Pakistan Airports Authority means that CAA has spun off its crash investigations and airports supervision functions to separate bodies. As separating out the airports was inevitable if they are to be privatized (and if the 2023 Pakistan Civil Aviation Act was to be implemented), it seems that it was also considered expedient to separate out crash investigations. After all, crashes might be the result of some failure of the CAA, and it would not be right to have an investigating body under the direct administrative control of a body that was itself being investigated.
The interest will probably focus on the PAA, because it has 52 airports under its control. Perhaps the impetus towards privatization was derived from the Sialkot International Airport, which is owned and operated by the Sialkot Chamber of Commerce and Industry, not the CAA. While the model of state organizations like the CAA developing airports has been standard, privatization is now taking place, as it is realized that running an airport is essentially a business, and the state would do better to concentrate on regulation rather than anything else.
In fact, apart from the CAA’s regulatory functions of aviation, which will continue, the new PAA will still have a role after whatever privatization is carried out. The new body will have to make sure that airports continue to facilitate both airlines and passengers to make journeys easier. While the CAA will obviously have the lead role in this, the PAA will have a crucial role to perform. All three of the new bodies also have the task of ensuring that they put in place a robust regulatory framework designed with the passengers’ interests placed first, with due input from all stakeholders, especially the airlines. The CAA was the sole organization under the Aviation Division, but now there will be three. The CAA once had an unenviable reputation as a place where there would be jobs for the boys from the PAF and PIA. It is to be hoped that the new bodies avoid that slur. Meanwhile, there should be questions asked about other parts of the CAA which could well be privatized. For example, it contains certain training institutions. Does the government have to run them? Similarly, not solely in aviation, but in many other sectors, the government needs to look at what it is doing and ask itself if it should.
