Yemenia Crash Stirs Calls for Stronger Watchdogs

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MADRID — As the sole survivor of a flight that crashed near the island nation of Comoros arrived in Paris on Thursday, debate was brewing in Europe about whether aviation watchdogs needed more potent tools to guard against lax airline safety standards, especially in the developing world.

The crash of the Yemenia flight on Tuesday that carried 153 passengers and crew members outraged Comorans in France, who said that the airline had long used substandard aircraft. The crash has prompted some transportation officials to call for a global “blacklist” that could shame unsafe airlines or ban them from operating.

The sole survivor, Bahia Bakari, spent hours clinging to plane wreckage in the Indian Ocean not far from Moroni, the capital of Comoros. Bahia, who is 12, sustained a broken collarbone, as well as burns and bruises. Her mother died in the crash, and the girl was flown back to France on Thursday to be reunited with her father, Kassim Bakari.

“It’s incredible, she remembers everything,” Mr. Bakari said in a telephone interview from the Armand-Trousseau Hospital in eastern Paris, where Bahia was in intensive care. “She told me that when the plane hit the water, she thought she had been electrocuted.”

Comorans continued to mount angry protests in France on Thursday, clashing with the police in Marseille as they tried to stop passengers from checking in for a Yemenia flight to Moroni, The Associated Press said. Others marched silently after a memorial service at a Paris mosque that the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, attended.

The cause of the crash has not been determined. Yemenia officials said the aircraft that crashed, an A310-300 Airbus, had passed safety inspections and flown twice to London in the past week.

Representatives of SOS Voyage aux Comores, a group created a year ago to lobby for better safety on Yemenia routes, said the French authorities had not heeded calls to clamp down on the airline.

They contended that European and American aviation authorities were not sufficiently concerned about the safety practices of airlines that operate outside European or American airspace, where lax performance has led to a higher rate of fatal accidents. In Africa, there is one accident for about every 250,000 flights, about five times the global average.

“No one ever took us seriously before this tragedy,” Mustapha Abdou-Raouf, a spokesman for SOS, said in a telephone interview. He and other members of the group described loose baggage piled in the cabin during Yemenia flights to Moroni, broken seats and seat belts and filthy toilets.

“You can’t play with people’s lives like this, in such a casual, such an arrogant way,” Mr. Adbouroiou said.

Dominique Bussereau, France’s secretary of state for transportation, called Thursday for a global blacklist of airlines that did not fulfill safety requirements. Antonio Tajani, Europe’s transportation chief, made a similar proposal earlier this week. The European Union sent a letter on Wednesday to Yemenia seeking full details of the crash and of safety procedures, said a European Union spokesman, Fabio Pirotta.

In an interview published in the French newspaper Le Figaro, Mr. Bussereau said that, because of Europe’s stringent safety controls, airlines from “certain distant countries” used their best aircraft on European routes. He said French inspectors in 2007 had found “unnerving anomalies” in the plane that crashed Tuesday; it was used only for the leg of the journey between Sana, the capital of Yemen, and Moroni. The flight, which originated in Paris, used a different aircraft from France to Yemen.

The European Union already publishes a so-called blacklist of nearly 200 airlines, many of them based in Africa or former Soviet states, which are banned from flying in European airspace.

In addition, the International Air Transport Association, the airlines’ trade group, requires that members comply with its operational safety audit, a system that measures compliance with hundreds of processes and procedures that enhance safety. Anthony Concil, a spokesman for the association, said Yemenia had passed its audit in 2008 and had never before had a fatal crash.

Airline officials and experts said a global blacklist could be difficult to enforce since it would have to be carried out by aviation authorities in countries where corruption, weak governments and poverty compromise safety standards.

And sometimes the aviation infrastructure in the developing world can be the cause of a crash, not the airline, said Paul Hayes, the head of accidents and insurance at Ascend, an aviation industry consulting firm in London. An effective blacklist would have to cover national aviation authorities as well, Mr. Hayes said.