May 22, 2020. A tragic and gloomy day which Pakistanis will never forget. On the last Friday of Ramadan, just two days before a favourite festive occasion, Eid-ul-Fitr, a Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) plane with 99 passengers and crew on board crashed into a residential area in Malir called Model Colony, approximately four kilometers away from the airport in Karachi.

Miraculously there were two survivors, while the rest of the passengers perished in the crash. The 15-year-old Airbus A320, was ying from Lahore to Karachi just as Pakistan had resumed domestic ights in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. On May 26, a team of Airbus technical advisers arrived in Karachi from France to investigate the crash.

The ill-fated Airbus A320 plane was handed over to PIA in 2014 and had completed 47,100 ight hours and 25,860 ight cycles until its crash.The PK-8303 tragedy has become the third most- catastrophic aviation disaster in the country’s history.