Air traffic controllers accused of lacking professionalism

The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) seems to have drawn no lesson from the worst Airblue plane crash as air traffic controllers at the Islamabad Airport are dilettante and oftentimes commit errors, exacerbating safety issues for Islamabad-bound or departing flights.
"Sub-standard air traffic controlling is observed repeatedly at Islamabad Airport. I have repeatedly been writing such complaints about Islamabad air traffic control but nothing has been rectified so far," stated a pilot in his debrief report recently. The pilot of PIA flight PK-702 on Tuesday from MAN to Islamabad wrote in his debrief report, a copy of which is available with this correspondent, that air traffic controllers at Islamabad airport nearly endangered his flight due to very poor controlling of traffic.
"''Due to very poor controlling at Islamabad, we received an automatic advice (R.A) on TCAS (equipment in aircraft which alerts about conflicting traffic) at 5500 feet and had to steep climbed to 7500'' where a helicopter observed at 400'' below us," the report claimed. Meanwhile, aviation experts were surprised to learn that the ATC and Islamabad airport authorities have not yet learned anything from the tragic Airblue incident and still are making such grave errors which could result in a far greater tragedy given the traffic at Islamabad airport.
"It is quite sad that authorities here don''t learn from their mistakes. In fact they carry on with their usual negligence and don''t bother about the safety of passengers. This was a serious incident happened with this pilot but this too would not wake up our aviation authorities from their deep slumber," a source said.
He said that pilot duly mentioned that this negligence by ATC was a regular feature at Islamabad airport but still not resolved, which showed the CAA was still indifferent to this negligence and in no mood to set things right at such a busy airport. "The CAA should not then ask from pilots to report safety violations if they are not to act on that. This is a serious issue but CAA has turned it into a joke despite that we have had worst air accident at Islamabad a few years back. I feel we should know that our CAA is good for nothing," added a source at PALPA.
It is to be noted that the Airblue Flight 202 was a scheduled domestic passenger flight which crashed on 28 July 2010 in the Margalla Hills located north of Islamabad, making it the deadliest air accident in the history of Pakistan. The earlier report into the incident by CAA did not mention the role of Air Traffic Controllers and the mistake or mistakes committed by them as it was CAA''s own department; however, when Peshawar High Court took up the matter for hearing it rejected the report and ordered CAA to broaden the scope of its report. The final revised report submitted by CAA Pakistan mentioned poor quality of Air Traffic Control besides other areas that required upgrading at Islamabad Airport. Unfortunately, however, it seems nothing has been done so far in this regard.