Posted on 01/05/2004 7:51:10 AM PST by Clive
The Egyptian charter airline whose Boeing 737 crashed on Saturday killing all 148 people on board, including 133 French tourists, has been banned from flying to one European country for more than a year because of safety concerns, it emerged on Sunday.
Swiss aviation authorities said Flash Airlines, whose flight FSH604 from the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh to Paris plunged into the Red Sea within minutes of takeoff, had been barred from Swiss airspace since October 2002 after a spot check on one of its jets uncovered safety problems.
"During a routine inspection at Zurich we discovered the airline was a danger to aviation security," said Celestine Perissinotto, a spokesperson for the Swiss Federal Office for Civil Aviation. "It concerned violations of the rules of the International Civil Aviation Organisation."
She declined to give details, but said the airline had not done enough to allow the ban to be lifted. If a company was banned from national airspace, it meant the problems were "serious", she added.
The Egyptian aviation minister, Ahmed Shafiq, denounced the accusations as "baseless" and the chief pilot of Flash Airlines, Hassan Mounir, denied that the ban was due to safety concerns, saying it stemmed from "a financial problem". But he confirmed one of the airline's two Boeing 737s had caught fire while flying from Sharm el-Sheik to Bologna, Italy, during the same month as the Zurich airport inspection.
The jet made an emergency landing at Athens airport with flames coming out of the starboard engine. "To say the plane was decrepit would be a compliment," one passenger, Eugenio Gedda, later told Italian television.
Mounir insisted, how ever, that the six-year-old company's planes were "very well maintained".
Yesterday the grim search resumed for bodies and wreckage from the crash, one of the worst ever involving French passengers. Four aircraft and 40 boats quartered a 10km square expanse of sea, but rescue workers had so far found only small pieces of debris, mainly personal effects such as toys and papers, and "very few" body parts, officials said. The local governor, Mostafa Afifi, said the 11-year-old plane had hit the sea so hard that everything had smashed into fragments. "We can't say that we have found bodies as bodies," he said.
After visiting a hospital morgue in Sharm el-Sheikh, some 480km from Cairo, the French foreign secretary, Renaud Muselier, said that the human remains were so badly shattered that only "scientific means" -- DNA tests -- would be able to identify them.
France, declared "a nation in mourning" by the prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, dispatched a military surveillance plane, a C-130 military transport plane, the Tourville, a naval frigate with advanced sonar capabilities, and 16 divers from Djibouti in the Horn of Africa. It was was also sending the Achille, a robot submarine, to help search for the wreckage and remains, which are lying in up to 1 000m of water.
Experts said only a robot would be able to recover the aircraft's two vital black box flight recorders, which could help explain what went wrong, since human divers can go down to depths of only around 250m.
Radar images showed that the pilot tried to turn back shortly after takeoff and was making the turn when the plane went into the sea. Egyptian and French authorities have so far ruled out a terrorist attack and insist the cause was technical, but have given no detailed explanation for the crash.
Most of the passengers were on a holiday organised by Fram, France's third largest tour operator. The company said it had 125 people, on the flight. The dead included seven members of the same family.
France will fly relatives out to the crash zone in the middle of this week, according to the transport minister, Gilles de Robien. The cardinal of Paris, Jean-Marie Lustiger, celebrated mass at Notre Dame cathedral on Sunday in memory of the victims. - Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003
| Rank | Location | Receipts | Donors/Avg | Freepers/Avg | Monthlies | |||
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| 41 | New Hampshire | 50.00 |
1 |
50.00 |
98 |
0.51 |
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Who would let their family fly on such a thing?
Or Spirit.
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