Why flight training in Pakistan is a waste of money

Two photographers, two altitudes

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing a pair of guests who shoot the same subject from opposite ends of the sky. Wasif, returning to the show after an earlier appearance, is one of Pakistan’s most awarded drone operators — the founder of Art by Wasif and a familiar name in the country’s commercial drone space. Sitting next to him is Salman Tareen, an eighteen-year-old aviation photographer from Quetta who now lives in Lahore. One shoots the ground from the air. The other shoots the air from the ground.

Muzamil turns to Salman first. “I was crazy about aviation since I was a child,” Salman says. He traces the obsession back to class one or two and explains how, in 2017, a cousin’s friend connected him to a Facebook group of plane spotters. That introduction, more than any formal training, is what put a camera in his hand and pointed it at the sky.

For a six-year-old, Muzamil asks, how would you define plane spotting? Salman’s answer is simple. You go to a position near an airport. You wait for an aircraft. You capture it. The lenses are long — heavy zoom glass is standard — and the same kit doubles for shooting the moon when there is nothing in the air worth photographing.

Plane spotting as a collection problem

What is the point of photographing the same Airbus A380 twice? Muzamil pushes on this early, framing it as a Pokémon-card or baseball-card instinct scaled up to commercial aviation. Salman agrees. The hobby is built on registrations, not airframes. Each aircraft carries a unique tail registration, the way a car carries a number plate. Pakistani aircraft begin with the prefix AP. Emirates uses A6. Each new registration captured is a new card in the binder.

He offers a piece of trivia Muzamil clearly enjoys. There is an Emirates jet whose registration begins with EK rather than A6, because Pakistan once transferred the aircraft to Emirates and the original code stuck. The registration is, in effect, Emirates Karachi. It is the kind of detail that only matters to a community of twenty-five to thirty people in Pakistan, which is roughly the size Salman gives when Muzamil asks how many serious spotters operate in the country.

He contrasts that figure with the Maldives, where plane spotting is legal, infrastructure is welcoming, and the airport is one of the busiest in the region after Dubai. Pakistanis travel there specifically to do legitimately what they cannot do at home.

Lenses, jet photos, and the screening queue

Salman talks Muzamil through the global infrastructure of the hobby. Jet Photos, he says, is the largest aviation photography website in the world, holding around five million images. You upload your shot. A screening team takes roughly fourteen to fifteen days to review it. Only then does it sit in the public catalogue under your name. There is no instant gratification.

He pulls up a live flight-tracking app on Muzamil’s phone and demonstrates how a spotter actually works. The app shows arrivals, departures, registration data, and aircraft type per flight. Tap an airport and you can see every inbound and outbound. He mentions another tool, LiveATC.net, that streams live air traffic control audio on a three-second delay. From Lahore you can hear controller and pilot exchanges as they happen. The Karachi airport code, he explains, is OPKC. Islamabad is OPIS. Lahore is OPLA. The vocabulary is small but precise, and Salman moves through it like someone who has been reading it since he was a child.

The Antonov, the call sign, and the Israeli aircraft

Muzamil asks for the most interesting moment Salman has captured. The answer is the world’s largest cargo aircraft — an Antonov, built in Ukraine, thirty-two years old, with thirty-two wheels and an engine startup time of fifteen minutes. It refuelled in Karachi while ferrying UK helicopters as part of the NATO exit from Afghanistan. There is only one such aircraft in operation, and Salman happened to be in position when it stopped over.

He brings up a separate incident — an Israeli aircraft that briefly entered Pakistani airspace and caused a media storm. Salman was not operating that day. He laughs and says the call sign on that flight was, fittingly, “lack of knowledge.” Muzamil seizes on the texture of the hobby. “So fascinating,” he says. “Photography is an element, but from that element comes the interest, and from that interest comes everything else.” A team member of his, he mentions, is similarly drawn to Afghanistan-related aviation movements. The pattern is consistent: the photograph is the entry point, the geopolitics is what holds people there.

The security wall

Muzamil names what both guests have been dancing around. Pakistani airports have been attacked multiple times. There has been terrorist activity. The state is, with reason, wary of anyone pointing a long lens at a runway. “I do understand the government being wary of it,” Muzamil says. “But how do you think we can grow this community in Pakistan?”

Salman’s answer is governance, not defiance. The community has to keep itself safe and sound. It cannot take negative advantage of the access it gets. And the Civil Aviation Authority, Muzamil suggests, should consider a programme that issues licences to people who apply through a formal process. Visiting cards, location vetting, photographs of aircraft only — not airport infrastructure. Both guests agree this is the path. The image of a heavy aircraft on final approach is a legitimate artistic subject. A photograph of a security checkpoint is not. The line is clear if anyone is willing to draw it.

Why becoming a pilot in Pakistan is bad maths

The conversation shifts from photographing aircraft to flying them. Muzamil, who grew up around peers who were funnelled into pilot training, asks whether the dream still holds. Salman’s answer is blunt. “Flying in Pakistan is a waste of money,” he says.

He walks through the economics. A commercial pilot licence in Pakistan costs three to four million rupees. The licence is real. The job market is not. PIA, the state carrier, has not put out a pilot advertisement in roughly four years. Private carriers — Air Blue, Serene, Airsial — want experienced pilots who already hold twenty-five hundred hours on a specific aircraft type. They are not a destination for fresh graduates. The training pathway that does work — type-rating courses through Air Arabia and similar Gulf operators — costs another six to seven lakh, and even then the supply of seats far outstrips the demand.

Muzamil asks what a PIA captain actually earns. Six to seven lakh, Salman says. A first officer at a foreign carrier earns twenty-five to thirty lakh. The gap is what makes the whole pipeline aspirational in the first place. But the foreign door is the harder one to open. Salman closes the topic with a fact Muzamil clearly was not expecting: Gulf carriers do not hire Pakistani cadet pilots. The flying clubs that feed those airlines are staffed by Indian instructors. “Emirates does not hire Pakistanis for training,” Salman says. The reasons are political, and they have hardened over time.

A hundred-crore daydream

Muzamil, in his usual habit, builds a hypothetical. Imagine he has one hundred crore rupees and a new house to furnish. What private jet should he buy? Salman recommends the Gulfstream G200 for style. Muzamil pulls up the price on his phone, fumbles a conversion from four million dollars to rupees, then quietly recalculates. They land on roughly four billion rupees for a new private jet at the entry end of the market, and anywhere from two to one hundred million dollars at the top.

The detour is a vehicle for a sharper point. Salman explains that flying a private jet is harder than flying a commercial route. The owner either hires the pilot directly or routes through the manufacturer — Boeing, Airbus, Embraer. He names the EMB and the ER series with the same fluency he uses for registration prefixes. Muzamil notes that Pakistan is now receiving ATR turboprops, which look small but are properly built. The hypothetical evaporates. The knowledge underneath it is real.

Lahore in fog, and CAT III pilots who are not CAT III rated

The most technical stretch of the conversation is also the most quietly damning. Salman explains why Lahore winter diversions happen. The runway’s instrument landing system is rated CAT III, the highest category, which in principle allows zero-visibility autolands. The catch is that the runway being CAT III does not mean the airlines using it have CAT III pilots. Embraer crews and Qatar crews are typically rated for it. Most other Pakistani airline pilots are not. So even though the infrastructure is there, half the fleet cannot legally use it in fog.

He goes further into the mechanics — runway numbering based on magnetic heading, the eighteen-from-thirty-six subtraction trick that gives the opposite end of the same strip, and how prevailing winds dictate which direction aircraft actually use on the day. The detail is dense, but Salman delivers it without showing off. Muzamil mostly lets him talk. It is the most useful version of plane-spotting content the conversation produces — a teenager casually explaining a system most adult travellers do not know exists.

Drones, FPV, and the Emirates stunt

Wasif, who has been waiting patiently, takes over for the drone half of the show. He explains FPV — first person view — drones, the goggles that operators wear, and the quad racing community that gave the format its first audience. Camera quads, he points out, came later. Once GoPros got small enough to mount on a racing frame, the cinematic FPV shot became its own art form.

The reference point, naturally, is the Emirates A380 promotional stunt — the one where two Red Bull-sponsored FPV pilots flew alongside a moving Emirates aircraft. Wasif and Salman both refer to it as a benchmark. The recent Emirates piece marking removal from the UK red list, Wasif notes, has been overhyped relative to what was technically achieved. The earlier stunt — with the hostess standing on top of the Burj Khalifa — is the one that mattered.

He references his own FPV drone, which had been damaged before the recording, and Muzamil wishes him a quick repair. The detail is small. The point is that the equipment is fragile, expensive, and not easily replaceable from Pakistan.

The case for physical art

Muzamil widens the conversation in its final stretch. He pulls a thread he has been holding all episode. Pakistani photographers, drone operators, and visual artists are stuck in digital monetisation. The YouTube video. The Instagram dance. The platform revenue share. He thinks the actual value of the work sits one floor up.

Why, he asks, are aviation photographers not running exhibitions? Why are there no coffee-table books of Salman’s catalogue? Why are PC venues not being booked for ticketed shows where a community of enthusiasts can see the work at scale? He references an installation he experienced abroad — a room where sensors detected your movement and parted the indoor rainfall so you could walk through without getting wet. A simple intersection of art and technology. Something Pakistan, he argues, is fully capable of producing if anyone bothered to organise it.

“A lot of the appreciation of art is directly dependent on the economic conditions of the people,” Muzamil says. The point is not that Pakistan is too poor to support art markets. It is that the artists themselves have not built the commercial infrastructure that would let those markets exist. He frames it as a missing role — someone who is not a photographer, not a drone operator, but a producer who takes Wasif, Salman, and others and turns their catalogues into shows, books, and exhibitions. Both guests agree the gap is real. Neither of them is the person to fill it.

Closing

Muzamil wraps the conversation past the fifty-minute mark with the observation that it is the first time on his podcast that a guest has been talking in thirty-six-hour runway headings while he was nodding along trying to keep up. He acknowledges that Salman, at eighteen, knows more about the systems beneath Pakistani aviation than most adults who fly weekly. He thanks Wasif for the return appearance and notes that a third episode together is overdue.

He sends them off with a wish that the broken FPV drone comes back quickly, points the audience to the Facebook community link in the description, and signs out. The conversation has covered a hobby, an industry, a policy gap, and a market opportunity in under an hour. None of it was planned. All of it was earned by the two people in front of the camera knowing their subject better than the country has bothered to learn it.