New Delhi: Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) has a mystery on its hands—vanishing crew members. In the second such case this year, a cabin crew member went missing after the plane landed in Canada. There’s been no sign of the woman since she disappeared on Monday, 26 February, though the authorities recovered a terse farewell note in her hotel room in Toronto, which read: “Thank you, PIA.”
The missing crew member, Maryam Raza, was on flight PK-782 from Islamabad to Toronto and was scheduled to report back to duty for the return flight to Karachi the next day. But when she failed to do so, the authorities searched her room, which was where they found the letter and her PIA cabin crew uniform. Raza had joined the national carrier 15 years ago, according to a report in Dawn.
The incident has sparked much consternation on social media with one commenter, Daiem Usman, on an Instagram post describing PIA as ‘Pakistan Immigration Airlines’.
On the same post, many concluded that Raza possibly left because she was fed up with her country and “Pakistan’s Jungle Law” and had sought asylum in Canada. “She looks very intelligent and smart. She wants to live a life with respect and honesty,” said another commentator.
Ever since the report of the missing attendant, the mystery has captured the imaginations of Pakistanis and sparked endless speculation on social media. The news has been widely shared, and many users have joked on platforms such as Instagram about wanting a job with PIA.
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Runway runaways
In January, another PIA cabin crew member, Faiza Mukhtar, ‘disappeared’ in Canada under similar circumstances. But Raza and Mukhtar aren’t Pakistan’s only ‘runway runaways’. This has been something of a trend since 2018, when the first such incident was said to be reported about a flight attendant identified only as Mahira.
Another reported incident of such cabin crew disappearance came in 2019, when Shazia Saeed arrived in Paris in 2019 on PK734 and vanished after “sneaking” away from the crew’s hotel.
In 2023, at least seven cabin crew workers went missing in Canada. According to PIA spokesperson Abdullah Hafeez Khan, two cabin workers failed to report for their return flight after landing in Canada in December 2023. Another two crew members ‘vanished’ similarly last November too.
Various commentators have attributed the disappearances to the low wages paid to cabin crew and uncertainties around PIA’s future amid its impending privatisation. However, PIA has blamed Canada’s relaxed asylum policy for the disappearances. Khan has also claimed that it’s common for crew members across South Asia and other developing countries to seek asylum, and that the trend is not limited to the PIA.
As a measure to stop such flights of freedom, the airlines raised the minimum age for flight attendants traveling to Canada, reportedly to 50, and set up a special unit to investigate the disappearances.
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