Yemen airline's safety questioned

By Laurence Peter
BBC News

Yemenia is jointly owned by Saudi Arabia and Yemen

The quality of Yemenia's aircraft maintenance is under intense scrutiny after the fatal crash of an Airbus A310-300 jet off the Comoros with 153 people on board.

France wants to know why the passengers were transferred to a different Airbus plane for the Yemen-Comoros leg of their journey from France.

French Transport Minister Dominique Bussereau said faults had been found during safety inspections on the Yemenia A310 in 2007.

"Those faults were pointed out to the company by the French authorities and as it happens, this plane has never since reappeared in European airports," he said, without specifying the faults.

See a map of the plane's route

He said that since then France had put Yemenia "under surveillance, which means that we paid close attention to the condition of their aircraft".

Comoran complaints

Angry Comorans in France have complained that Yemenia's service on the Sanaa-Comoros route was poor.

"They treat people like cattle, they pile them in, they don't respect timetables, there are always technical problems," said Farid Soilihi of the campaign group SOS Voyages, quoted by the French news agency AFP.

Other Comorans also alleged that the flights were often overcrowded and even that some passengers lacked seatbelts.

The European Commission had demanded improvements from Yemenia after complaining of "significant safety deficiencies".

But in November 2008 the Commission concluded that Yemenia had addressed the problems, so it was not put on the EU's blacklist of airlines with substandard safety procedures.

Yemenia, flying 12 airliners, had a valid safety audit certificate from the International Air Transport Association (IATA) and had a solid safety record before this crash.

If a black box flight recorder is found it may give investigators some clues about whether a technical fault caused the crash or contributed to it.

Yemenis hit back

Yemeni officials have played down speculation about any technical shortcomings.

Airliners are subject to spot inspections, known as "ramp checks"

Yemenia's deputy general manager for operations, Muhammad al-Sumairi, said "the weather conditions were rough - strong wind and high seas" when the plane tried to land in Moroni at night.

Yemen's Transport Minister Khaled al-Wazir said the A310 had undergone a thorough inspection in May this year under Airbus supervision and had regularly flown to Europe.

According to a Yemeni pilot, Muhammad Moqbel, Moroni airport is "very poor in terms of equipment". "They don't have advanced radars to guide planes," he told the Associated Press news agency.

Attention has also focused on the age of the A310. It entered service with Yemenia in 1999 and had nearly 52,000 flying hours on the clock, with 17,300 takeoff and landing cycles. But that is similar to many jets flown by US and European airlines.

Kieran Daly, an aviation expert, said an airliner's age in itself was not a risk factor because every few years planes undergo a thorough "D check", in which they are "virtually taken apart and put back together again". That is in addition to the routine maintenance checks and spot inspections.

The international inspection system makes a ban on any specific plane pointless, he told the BBC.

"But the uncomfortable truth is that we've almost got two-tier air safety," said Mr Daly, editor of the website Air Transport Intelligence.

"Airlines in the developed world are clearly safer, broadly, than those in the developing world."

Blacklist debate

The EU's Transport Commissioner Antonio Tajani has called for a worldwide blacklist of deficient airlines, because currently Europeans cannot expect the same air safety standards outside the EU.

But Mr Daly voiced scepticism about the blacklist system.

"It has tended to include airlines very unlikely to fly to European destinations. The carriers have tended to be pretty obscure operators," he said.

Non-EU carriers are measured against internationally binding safety standards established by the 1944 Chicago Convention and its annexes. The convention set up the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO).

The way to go, according to Mr Daly, is to expand the richer countries' technical assistance for airlines and airports in the developing world.

The ICAO's safety inspections are also effective, he said, because the results are published and airlines are "embarrassed into sorting out their act".

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