Child Survives Crash of Yemeni Jet Carrying 153
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The plane, Flight 626, was carrying 142 passengers and 11 crew members on a flight from the Yemeni capital of Sana to Moroni, on the main island of Grand Comore. The flight originated in Paris on an Airbus A330 and stopped in Marseille before continuing to Yemen, where the passengers and crew changed to Flight 626, an Airbus A310-300.
The second plane crashed as it approached the Prince Said Ibrahim International Airport in Moroni in heavy winds 12 miles off the island’s coast, the Yemeni authorities and airline officials said.
The French transportation minister, Dominique Bussereau, told French television that the “A310 in question was inspected in 2007 by the DGAC and they noticed a certain number of faults.” He was referring to the French civil aviation authority.
The plane had not returned to France since that inspection, Mr. Bussereau said, adding that the airline was to be interviewed “shortly” by a European Union committee that has the power to ban airlines from European skies in the case of serious safety violations. The European Union is due to publish its latest quarterly list of airlines banned from the region next month.
Antonio Tajani, the European Union’s Transport commissioner, said in Brussels on Tuesday that Yemenia was not on an airline blacklist but that European safety officials would be contacting the airline for more details about the safety record of plane in question, which was 19 years old, as well as the rest of its fleet.
Mr. Tajani stressed that the plane that flew the first leg of the trip from France to Yemen, an A330, had passed recent safety inspections in Europe. “We cannot control what happens outside the European Union,” he said.
The European Union’s air safety committee asked Yemenia in July 2008 to take unspecified “corrective actions” to improve its safety performance. Mr. Tajani said that the airline had subsequently “passed the checks” to avoid being added to blacklist. The International Air Transport Association also said Tuesday that Yemenia had passed a safety audit by its inspectors in the spring of 2008.
Eric Héraud, a spokesman for the French air safety regulator, declined to comment further on the agency’s 2007 inspection of the Yemenia plane, saying that details of those checks would be provided to the authorities investigating the accident. Yemen’s transportation minister, meanwhile, told Reuters that the plane that crashed had undergone a thorough inspection in May under supervision by experts from Airbus.
“It was a comprehensive inspection carried out in Yemen,” Khaled Ibrahim al-Wazeer said. “It was in line with international standards.”
A spokesman for Yemenia, Mohammed Al-Sumairi, said that a child appeared to be the sole survivor of the crash to be found so far and that the search for additional survivors was ongoing. News reports from Yemen said the child was 5 years old and had been taken to a hospital but did not give further details.
The majority of the passengers on the doomed jet were from Comoros, returning home from Paris, the deputy chief of Yemen’s civil aviation authority, Mohammed Abdul Qader, told journalists in Sana.
The French Foreign Ministry said in a statement that 66 of the passengers were French. Hadji Mohamed Ali, the director of the airport at Moroni, told French radio that the plane lost radio contact with air traffic controllers five minutes before the crash.
President Nicolas Sarkozy expressed his “deep emotion” about the accident and said France was sending military equipment and personnel from the French islands of Mayotte and Réunion to assist in the search operation.
The Yemeni authorities said the bodies of at least five victims had been recovered, along with debris.
The accident is the second major crash involving an Airbus jet flying to or from France this month. On June 1, an Air France flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris crashed in the Atlantic, killing all 228 people aboard. The French air accident investigator was expected to publish its preliminary report on that accident Thursday.
Despite the safety concerns, Tuesday’s crash was the first fatal accident for Yemenia, which was founded in 1972, according to Ascend, a London-based aviation consulting firm.
The carrier has a fleet of 10 jet aircraft and five turboprop planes, ranging from between five and 30 years old. Prior to this crash, the airline’s only passenger death occurred in June 2007, when a security guard opened fire on a group of employees of an international oil company who were disembarking from a Twin Otter turboprop at Al-Naeem, in southern Yemen.
Airbus expressed its condolences to the families and friends of the crash victims and said Tuesday that it was sending a team of specialists to Comoros to provide “full technical assistance” to the authorities involved in the investigation.
Sharon Otterman contributed reporting from New York.
