• Flight 626 crashes on the way to Comoros
• Airline criticised over ‘flying cattle trucks’
A 14-year-old girl may be the sole survivor from an Airbus A310-300 jet from Yemen carrying 153 people that crashed into the Indian Ocean off the Comoros islands early yesterday.
Local officials said last night that the girl had been plucked from the sea after the plane went down in bad weather following a second aborted landing attempt at the international airport in Moroni, the capital of the archipelago. Three other bodies were reported to have been recovered.
The plane, operated by Yemenia, the state operator, was on the final leg of a journey that began in Paris on Monday morning. In the Yemeni capital, Sana’a, the passengers changed planes, boarding an older aircraft that had been banned from French airspace after faults were found during tests in 2007.
The Paris airports authority said 66 of the passengers were French, with most of the others from the Comoros, a former French colony.
The aircraft was the second Airbus plane to crash into the sea in a month. On 1 June an Air France A330-200 heading from Brazil to Paris plunged into the Atlantic Ocean during a thunderstorm, killing all 228 people on board, including 72 French nationals.
A French navy ship and two military aircraft were dispatched from the islands of Réunion and Mayotte to search for survivors of yesterday’s crash, which occurred in deep waters about nine miles north of the Comoros coast. Local speedboats also rushed to the area.
There was initial confusion over the identity of the only survivor, according to reports. “A doctor from the military hospital aboard one of the rescue boats called the Mitsamiouli hospital to tell them a child had been rescued alive,” Halidi Ahmed Abdou, a doctor at a medical centre opened for survivors, told Reuters.
Comoros communications minister Abdourahim Said Bakar said last night that earlier reports that the rescued child was a five-year-old boy were incorrect, and there was little likelihood of finding other survivors. An official at a local crisis centre set up after the crash said the 14-year-old girl was from a village in the centre of the archipelago.
Witnesses at the airport in Moroni on Grande Comore – the largest of the three Comoros islands, which are off Africa’s south-east coast between Mozambique and Madagascar – said they saw the plane approach twice before disappearing at 1.51am yesterday morning.
Mohammad al-Sumairi, Yemenia’s deputy general manager for operations, said there was no firm information about the reasons for the crash. The black box recorders have yet to be located. “The weather conditions were rough – strong wind and high seas. The wind speed recorded on land at the airport was 61kph [38mph]. There could be other factors,” he said.
But in France there were immediate questions about the safety record of the plane and the airline. Dominique Bussereau, the French transport minister, told parliament that the plane had been banned from France in 2007 because an inspection revealed it to have “a number of irregularities”. “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,” he said.
A European commission report last year noted deficiencies on Yemenia planes during inspections in France, Italy and Germany, and ordered the company to address safety concerns. In February, Yemenia was suspended from servicing EU-registered planes after failing audit inspections, according the European Aviation Safety Agency.
In France, relatives of the missing passengers railed against the airline, which is jointly owned by Yemen and Saudi Arabia, describing the Sanaa-Moroni leg of the journey from France as chaotic and uncomfortable. Stephane Salord, the Comoros’ honorary consul in Marseille, described Yemenia’s planes as “flying cattle trucks”. “This A310 is a plane that has posed problems for a long time,” he said.
Other Comorans said conditions were appalling, with some claiming that passengers even had to stand on some flights.
Thoue Djoumbe, a 28-year-old woman who lives in the French town of Fontainebleau, told Reuters that she and others had complained about the airline for years.
“It’s a lottery when you travel to Comoros,” she said. “We’ve organised boycotts, we’ve told the Comoran community not to fly on Yemenia airways because they make a lot of money off of us and meanwhile the conditions on the planes are disastrous.”
But Yemen’s government rejected speculation about the plane’s safety standard. Transport minister Khaled Ibrahim al-Wazeer said Airbus experts had been involved in a thorough check of the plane as recently as May. “It was in line with international standards,” he said.
An Airbus statement said the aircraft had been in service for 19 years and had accumulated 51,900 flight hours. It has been operated by Yemenia since 1999.
Comoros achieved independence from France in 1975, but the two countries retain close links. There are 200,000 immigrants from Comoros living in France, with the biggest community in the southern port city of Marseille. At the start of each summer thousands return to the islands to see their extended families.
The A310 is still in widespread use globally, with 214 planes flown by 41 airlines. Airbus, a subsidiary of the European aerospace company EADS, set up a crisis cell immediately after the crash yesterday and sent investigators to the Comoros. France also dispatched an investigating team.
EU transport commissioner Antonio Tajani said he wanted to see the creation of a global airline blacklist. “The European blacklist works pretty well in Europe,” he told journalists in Brussels.
