Pakistani airline PIA apologizes after ad showing plane heading into Eiffel Tower

Many Internet users have made a link between the company's visual and the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center towers in New York.

A plane heading straight for the Eiffel Tower. The Pakistani airline PIA apologized on Friday January 17 after a visual announcing the resumption of its flights to Paris created controversy. On January 10, for its first Islamabad-Paris flight after more than four years of ban, Pakistan International Airlines posted on its social networks an image of a plane flying towards the monument with the text “Paris, we’re arriving today”.

Many Internet users considered the ad clumsy, making the link with the September 11 attack, when Al-Qaeda crashed two planes into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, killing nearly 3,000 people. “Unfortunately, this has taken on unthinkable proportions, with insinuations that we never imagined”reacted the company's spokesperson, Abdullah Khan, to AFP.

“This may have hurt some people and we offer our most sincere apologies”he continued, listing 60,000 to 70,000 negative comments. Or less than 10% of reactions, according to him. The Pakistani Deputy Prime Minister, Ishaq Dar, even denounced the “stupidity” of this advertisement, announcing the opening of an investigation. Despite everything, the resumption of connections to Europe was “extremely positive”, assures Abdullah Khan with flights more than 95% full.

PIA was banned from European, British and American airspace in May 2020, after the crash of a company Airbus in Karachi which left 97 dead. Human errors by pilots and controllers had led the Pakistani government to admit that around 150 pilots had fake licenses or had obtained them by cheating. For now, the carrier is still banned from flying to the United Kingdom and the United States.