Pakistan International Airlines’ latest PR campaign featured an image of a plane barreling toward the Eiffel Tower
Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has ordered a probe into how the country’s national airline released an ad showing a plane seemingly bearing down on the Eiffel Tower in Paris. The ad caused outrage over its evocation of the 9/11 terror attacks.
Released last week by Pakistan International Airlines (PIA), the ad showed a plane flying toward the Eiffel Tower along with the caption “Paris, we’re coming today.”
Intended to celebrate the resumption of flights to the French capital after a four-year suspension over the inadequate licensing of PIA pilots, the ad was ridiculed online. “All they needed to add was Allahu Akbar,” one commenter wrote, while hundreds more mocked its similarity to the 9/11 attacks, in which Islamist hijackers flew commercial airliners into the World Trade Center and Pentagon in the US.
“Who designed this? Who or which agency manages its social media accounts? Did the airline management not vet this?”, Omar Quraishi, a former adviser to Pakistani ex-foreign minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari asked. “Do they not know that PIA is an airline owned by a country often accused of supporting terrorism?”
Osama bin Laden, the architect of the 9/11 attacks, was found and killed by US special forces in Pakistan in 2011, while the chief organizer of the hijackings, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, had been detained in Pakistan in 2003.
Pakistani Deputy Prime Minister Ishaq Dar told parliament this week that Sharif has already ordered an inquiry into the ad. Dar condemned PIA for its “stupidity” in publishing the advert, Pakistan’s GeoNews reported.
Last week’s advertisement is not the first seemingly ominous PR campaign launched by PIA. Back in 1979, the airline publicized its Paris-New York route by taking out a half-page ad in France’s Le Point newspaper showing the shadow of a Boeing 747 on the glass facade of the iconic Twin Towers.
More recently, the airline was mocked after its ground staff sacrificed a goat on the tarmac for good luck ahead of a domestic flight in 2016. The airline insisted at the time that its staff had acted of their own initiative, and that ritual slaughter is not company policy.
