Daily Independent (Lagos)
Rafiu Ajakaye
1 July 2009
Lagos — A Yemenia (Yemeni Airways) jet with 153 people on board crashed into the Indian Ocean on Tuesday as it tried to land during strong winds on the island nation of Comoros.
The crash came exactly one month after Air France Flight 447 plunged into the Atlantic, killing all 228 passengers and crew on board. The multinational search team has yet to recover that aircraft's black boxes, leaving the exact cause of the crash to speculation.
In the Tuesday crash, officials said one child, aged five, was plucked alive from the sea. There was no word on other survivors. At least three bodies were recovered.
The accident came two years after aviation officials reported faults with the aircraft, an Airbus 310 flying the last leg of a journey from Paris and Marseille to Comoros, with a stop in Yemen to change planes.
Most of the passengers were from Comoros, a former French colony. Sixty-six of those on board were French nationals.
A child was rescued from the water after the crash, according to Rachida Abdullah, a Police Immigration Officer who works at the operations centre in the Comoros, and Yemeni Civil Aviation Deputy Chief, Mohammed Abdul Qader.
Further details on the rescue and the child's condition were not immediately available. Three bodies from the flight were retrieved along with debris from the plane, Abdullah said.
Qader cautioned that it is too early to speculate on the cause of the crash, as the flight data recorder has not been found. The wind was 40 miles per hour (61 kilometres per hour) as the plane was landing in the middle of the night.
"The weather was very bad, the wind was very strong," he said, adding the windy conditions are hampering rescue efforts.
A crisis centre once again was set up at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris. Many passengers were from the French city of Marseille, which has a large Comoros community.
"There is considerable dismay," said Stephane Salord, Consul General of the Comoros in the Provence-Alps-Cote d'Azur region of France.
"These are families that, each year on the eve of summer, leave Marseille and the region to rejoin their families in the Comoros and spend their holidays."
In France , this week is the start of annual summer school vacations.
The Comoros is an archipelago of three main islands situated about 1,800 miles (2,900 kilometres) south of Yemen, between Africa's south eastern coast and the island of Madagascar. It is a former French colony of 700,000 people.
General Bruno de Bourdoncle de Saint-Salvy, Senior Commander for French Forces in the southern Indian Ocean, said the Airbus 310 crashed in deep waters about nine miles (14.5 kilometres) north of the Comoran coast and 21 miles (34 kilometres) from the Moroni Airport.
French aviation inspectors found a "number of faults" during a 2007 inspection of the plane, French Transport Minister, Dominique Bussereau disclosed on television.
In Brussels, European Union (EU) Transport Commissioner, Antonio Tajani, said the airline had previously met EU safety checks and was not on its blacklist.
But he added that a full investigation is now being started amid questions why passengers were put on another jet in the Yemeni capital of Sanaa.
An Airbus statement said aircraft went into service 19 years ago, in 1990, and had accumulated 51,900 flight hours. It had been operated by Yemenia since 1999.
Airbus is sending a team of specialists to the Comoros.
The A310-300 is a twin-engine wide-body jet that can seat up to 220 passengers. There are 214 A310s in service worldwide with 41 operators.
Christophe Prazuck, French Military Spokesman, said a patrol boat and reconnaissance ship are being sent to the crash site as well a military transport plane.
The French are sending divers as well as medical personnel.
French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, expressed "his deep emotion" about the crash and asked the French military to help in the rescue operation, particularly from the French islands of Mayotte and Reunion.
Yemenia officials said the crew of 11 members was made up of six Yemenis, including the pilot, two Moroccans, one Indonesian, one Ethiopian and one Filipino.
The plane was banned from France because of "irregularities," said Bussereau, who told Parliament of ongoing concerns about the safety record of the Yemenia Airbus 310.
Most had flown on a different Yemenia aircraft from Paris or Marseille before boarding flight IY626 in Sanaa.
Bussereau raised concerns about the transfer of passengers from a plane classed as safe to one which crashed into the ocean.
"A few years ago, we banned this plane from national territory because we believed it presented a certain number of irregularities in its technical equipment," he 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."
However, a Spokesman for the airline said poor weather was more likely to have been a factor in the crash than the condition of the plane.
Yemeni Transport Minister, Khaled Ibrahim al-Wazeer, also explained that the plane had recently undergone a thorough inspection overseen by Airbus, which conformed to international standards.
The crash prompted the EU to highlight its own concerns about Yemenia's safety record, proposing a world blacklist of those carriers deemed unsafe.
The EU already has its own list, and Tajani argued that such a list would be a "safety guarantee for all."
Another EU official said there are concerns about the airline's "incomplete reporting procedure and incomplete follow-up" following 2007 tests on the aircraft that crashed, but that its record is improving.
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