In the past two decades, we have had more than 15 tourism ministers who have done nothing for tourism, civil aviation, or culture. They were only minting some illegal chiya kharcha from plane deals and so-called international airport constructions. At the same time, the European smart-arses, the EU wallahs continued to ban our planes from flying to Europe.
The Civil Aviation Authority of Nepal (CAAN) is a big joke. They allow our slimy domestic plane sahujis to fly their planes without safety checks and then blame all domestic air accidents on the pilots. And the hakims at CAAN are always called up for questioning for their roles in engaging in corruption every other week. I think the former hakim is now in prison, facing a decades-long sentence for his ghoosh-khori activities.
Yes, we live in a pretty difficult country when it comes to flying around but that doesn't mean it's risky to fly our domestic planes. There are hundreds of flights daily and yes, we do have one accident or two every other year but the foreign media makes it look like we fly broken planes and don't care about passenger safety.
We have the mountains and the hills and the weather can change faster than your TikTok reels and most crashes occur in the mountain region due to such conditions.
It's not that our pilots are incompetent. They have been flying for years, but our airline sahujis force them to fly even during bad weather and that's when most of our crashes occur. Well, sometimes pilot error does play a role, but that happens everywhere.
If you look at the golden days for our Nepal Airlines, then it was the 90s when we had just two 757s flying to Tokyo, Hong Kong, Frankfurt, London and other international destinations. Now, we have the European planes instead of the American ones but we are not allowed to take the same flight route as in the 90s because they think our safety record is not as good as theirs. Well, it's their planes (we bought if from the Europeans) and our pilots flying international routes have done a pretty good job in the past thirty years with no crashes.
It's not like our domestic pilots or the paragliders from Pokhara are flying the bigger planes to Dubai or Hong Kong. It's just another excuse for them, and their main goal must be to not allow our national carrier to make some extra Euros!
The EU says they are worried because of safety concerns. We are not flying home-made planes on international routes, are we? Nepal Airlines has one of the best safety records in the world when it comes to international flights but the EU wallahs seem to suffer from amnesia. Instead, we have had other international carriers crashing in our land in the past three decades but not our good old Nepal Airlines! We should be proud of that.
They want us to break CAAN and have a different regulatory body, and we are fine with that. Our Balen government plans to do that in the coming days. And when that happens, let's hope the EU wallahs will not have any more excuses to stop our Nepal Airlines from flying to London, Paris, Geneva and other European destinations and hopefully we can see tens of millions of European tourists trekking up our hills and enjoying their beer at Lakeside or hiking around Kathmandu Valley!
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