Flight 8303, an Airbus A320 carrying 99 passengers and crew from Lahore, approached Karachi's Jinnah International Airport too high and too fast. Air traffic control instructed the crew to orbit and lose altitude. The pilots ignored this instruction. On the first approach, the aircraft touched down on its belly -- its landing gear was not deployed. Both engines scraped the runway, sustaining catastrophic damage. The crew attempted a go-around, climbing away from the runway on engines that were now fatally compromised. The aircraft managed to gain some altitude before both engines lost power. The Airbus came down in Model Colony, a dense residential neighborhood barely a mile from the airport threshold.

Of the 99 people aboard, only two survived: the president of the Bank of Punjab and a young engineer seated near an emergency exit. On the ground, homes were crushed and set ablaze. A 13-year-old girl cleaning the upper floor of her house with her sisters suffered burns so severe that she died in the hospital ten days later. DNA testing was required to identify most victims; within three weeks, 95 had been identified, though the process was marred by allegations of misidentification and delays. The Edhi Foundation, Pakistan's largest private ambulance and welfare service, reported that 19 bodies were forcibly removed from its morgue by relatives unwilling to wait for formal identification. The crash occurred just before Eid, and many passengers had been traveling home to celebrate with family.

The Aircraft Accident Investigation Board released its final report on February 25, 2024. The findings were devastating. Captain Sajjad Gul had a documented history of problems with approaches. His initial psychiatric evaluation had recommended against a pilot career, but he obtained clearance through alternative channels. The crew's fasting during Ramadan likely impaired their judgment; PCAA regulations explicitly prohibited flying while under the effects of fasting, but PIA's own manuals were ambiguous on the rule. The airline's flight data analysis program covered less than five percent of flights. Only six of Captain Gul's last 289 flights had been reviewed. The European Aviation Safety Agency had flagged PIA's safety management system as insufficient in 2019. None of the deficiencies had been corrected by the time of the crash.

The crash ripped open a scandal far larger than one flight. On June 24, 2020, Pakistan's aviation minister told parliament that 262 of the country's 860 pilots held inauthentic licenses, alleging that many had paid others to take their exams. PIA immediately grounded 150 of its 434 pilots. The European Union banned PIA from its airspace on June 30, followed by the United Kingdom and the United States within weeks. The ban lasted years. It was not until November 29, 2024, that the EASA lifted the EU prohibition after PIA passed a safety audit. The UK followed in July 2025. For a nation whose flag carrier had once been a source of pride, the grounding was a humiliation that forced a reckoning with decades of institutional neglect.