ISLAMABAD
Every superstitious passenger has ways of dealing with the existential uncertainties of air travel, but the ground crew of one Pakistani airliner raised the stakes on preflight rituals when it sacrificed a goat on the runway.
The age-old custom in Pakistan for warding off evil and bad luck is simple: Slaughter an animal. For extra luck, make it a black goat.
Last month, just a few days after a Pakistan International Airlines propeller plane crashed, killing all 48 people on board, some members of the airline’s staff felt the flying public could use some extra luck.
A photo went viral of a group of men slaughtering a black goat on the tarmac of Islamabad’s Benazir Bhutto International Airport, its blood staining the ground in front of an aeroplane.
Ridiculed by elites
Such rituals are common in Pakistan, a majority Muslim country, but the sacrifice was quickly ridiculed by the country’s educated elites.
It also seems to have had the unintended consequence of scaring passengers who worried that slaughtering goats was the airline’s best effort at ensuring its planes were safe to fly.
“This is so beyond stupid,” read a Twitter post by Adil Najam, a well-known Pakistani academic who is also the dean of the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University.
A poor goat “gets slaughtered by #PIA to keep its planes safe,” Najam wrote.
Across social strata, Pakistani society is deeply conservative and superstitious. Ritual slaughters are as common in major cities as they are in rural areas.
Aides to former president Asif Ali Zardari were known to sacrifice animals whenever Zardari found himself in the midst of a political scandal.
Zardari would also frequently travel on the advice of a trusted spiritual healer, who would tell the president when he should leave the capital, Islamabad, to visit Karachi.
Zardari, whose wife, Benazir Bhutto, was assassinated, survived his full term despite several political crises. Many Pakistanis attributed his resilience to the advice of healers and soothsayers.
For many Pakistani travellers, the sacrifice did not reassure them about the airline’s safety. Instead, they criticised the national air carrier for relying on superstitions rather than good engineering practices.
In a statement, the airline distanced itself from the crewmen who killed the goat. The men, the airline said, were not authorised to conduct the sacrifice.
— New York Times
News Service
