France banned the Yemenia A310-300 Airbus that crashed near Comoros yesterday from French soil after faults were found in a test in 2007, Transport Minister Dominique Bussereau said.
He said he was investigating whether picking up passengers in France in one plane and then transferring them to a possibly less safe one in another location was allowable, Reuter`s reports.
“A few years ago we excluded this plane from national soil because we considered that it had a number of irregularities,” Bussereau told parliament.
“The question we are asking is whether you can collect people in a normal way on French territory and then put them in a plane that does not ensure their security. We do not want this to happen again.”
Faults were detected in France in 2007 on the A310.
Yemen’s transport minister said the aircraft had undergone a thorough inspection in May under Airbus supervision.
“It was a comprehensive inspection carried out in Yemen with experts from Airbus,” Khaled Ibrahim al-Wazeer told Reuters by telephone from the Yemeni capital Sanaa.
Many of the passengers began their journey in Paris or Marseille aboard a different Yemenia plane, an A330. They switched to the A310 in Sanaa.
Bussereau had said in an early morning radio interview that the plane was not at fault in the crash.
A European Commission official said the 2007 examination of the A310 had sparked an inquiry into Yemenia’s safety record.
And the European Aviation Safety Agency said the EU had suspended permission for Yemenia to service EU-registered planes last February after it failed a set of audit inspections.
Although Yemenia operated the A310, it was owned by International Lease Finance. It was registered in Yemen.
Comorians protest, plane crash search resumes
French and US aircraft joined the hunt today for possible survivors from a plane that crashed off the Comoros archipelago, while in Paris expatriate Comorians tried to block another flight by the same airline.
The Yemenia-run Airbus A310-300 went down in the Indian Ocean yesterday morning with 153 people on board as it came in to land at Moroni, the Comoran capital. It was flying the final leg of a trip from Paris and Marseille to Comoros via Yemen.
Just one survivor, a 14-year-old Franco-Comoran girl has been found in the sea.
“Up to now we haven’t found any other survivors, but we haven’t given up hope,” Comoran vice-president Idi Nadhoim told Reuters by telephone.
As a flotilla of boats took to sea off the main Grande Comore Island at first light, angry Comoran expatriates tried to block passengers from checking into another flight from Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport to Yemen, the airports authority said.
About 60 people who had been due to take the flight did not check in, though the spokesperson could not say if the protest was the cause or if they had decided not to travel for another reason.
About 100 people did check in and the flight took off.
The survivor from the doomed flight, identified as Bakari Bahia, had cuts to her face and a fractured collar-bone. She was picked up during rescue efforts on yesterday.
“Her health is not in danger. She is very calm given the shock she suffered,” local surgeon Ben Imani told Reuters at Moroni’s El Marouf hospital.
Sixty-six French nationals were aboard the flight, Paris officials said.
Though a full list has not yet been published, a Yemeni official said there were also nationals from Canada, Comoros, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Morocco, the Palestinian territories, the Philippines and Yemen on board.
Comoran officials said France had sent a plane, and was also moving two ships into the area while the United States had sent a helicopter to help, and a plane with supplies.
With a population of about 800 000, the formerly French-ruled Comoros archipelago comprises three islands off mainland east Africa and just north-west of Madagascar.
