EU Pushes Global Blacklist
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By Robert Wall
In the wake of yesterday’s crash of Yemenia Flight IY626, European Union Transport Commissioner Antonio Tajani is urging for an expansion of the EU’s aviation blacklist.
Yemenia was not on the blacklist the EU uses to bar airlines from operating in its territory, but it had been slated for review, and Tajani said more meetings were planned. Yemenia had passed IATA’s operational safety audit (IOSA), which has become a safety standard for the airline industry.
Tajani says he will raise the issue of expanding the blacklist at a pending meeting with top representatives from the International Civil Aviation Organization. “My idea is to propose a global blacklist that is similar to the one used in the European Union,” Tajani said at a news conference in Brussels.
The EU blacklist was first published in 2006. Setting up the list was not without controversy, in part because it was purely punitive and, some industry officials argue, did not do enough to help countries improve their safety performance.
The last update to the blacklist was issued in April, and a new version is due in the coming weeks.
A year ago, the European Commission closely examined Yemenia’s safety record but decided not to put the airline on the blacklist, asking instead for corrective actions to be taken.
At the time, the EC argued that “there is verified evidence of non-compliance with specific safety standards established by the Chicago Convention on the part of the carrier Yemenia,” problems French, German and Italian officials identified during ramp inspections. The EC said that “Yemenia has concluded a contract with the aircraft manufacturer Airbus whereby the latter will provide technical experts and auditors to train staff (pilots and engineers) and monitor the performance of the carrier in two specific areas: maintenance and engineering and aircraft operations. The carrier was audited by Airbus in these two areas in November and December 2007 and then presented a series of corrective actions to improve the safety performance and also address in a systematic way the safety deficiencies detected during ramp inspections which affected these areas.”
The initial action plan was deemed insufficient, but an updated version was provided two months later. At the time, the EC said that it “acknowledges the efforts deployed by Yemenia to correct the detected safety deficiencies. Moreover, the latest ramp inspections in the Community have not shown major deficiencies. However the Commission considers that the corrective actions submitted by Yemenia must be fully implemented and closely monitored, and that member states should verify systematically the effective compliance with relevant safety standards through the prioritization of ramp inspections to be carried out on aircraft of this carrier.”
Photo: SkyTeam
