Word: yemenia
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...surface, the news that Yemenia Airways, whose jet crashed off the coast of the Comoros Islands on Tuesday, was not on the European Union's blacklist of airlines deemed lax on safety seems like a good argument for not only maintaining the blacklist, but extending it further...
...Some families of the 152 victims, 66 of them French nationals, claim their relatives died as a result of sub-standard practices the airline uses once it's beyond the view of European inspectors (Efforts to contact Yemenia officials for comment this week were unsuccessful). The modern Airbus A330 that Yemenia flies from Paris to Sanaa in Yemen, they charge, was systematically swapped for an aging A310 for the final leg to Comoros' capital Moroni. Meanwhile, Transport Minister Dominique Bussereau pointed out that the A310 that crashed Tuesday had been banned in France since 2007 after failing security checks...
...problem with all that is, it only tells half the story. "Yemenia actually has a modern fleet and enviable safety record, with this being its first loss of life in 36 years," says Ronan Hubert, aviation accident expert and president of the Geneva-based Aircraft Crashes Record Office. "I can't say whether the claims by Comorans of appalling service aboard are valid or not, but service isn't the same as safety, and on that point Yemenia's record speaks for itself...
...airline's near-sparkling safety record is of little comfort to France's enraged Comoran community of 250,000. Following the crash, their protests of what they call Yemenia's reckless practices disrupted the airline's flights from Paris' Charles de Gaulle airport and forced it to discontinue its flights from Marseille. "This accident was inevitable, because these planes don't respect international standards," says Farid Soilihi, president of the Marseille-based SOS Voyages To Comoros association, which was formed in 2008 to protest Yemenia's service. "Yemenia's quasi-monopoly [allows it] to treat us like we're animals...
...British Airways, Air Kenya and others offer similar service to Moroni, albeit with stopovers in Africa, rather than Yemen - some even at lower prices. When questioned about this, SOS Voyages to Comoros argued that seats on other airlines are often fully booked, leaving travelers no choice but to fly Yemenia. "People only fly Yemenia if they can't get on the others," explains Mustapha Abdou-Raouf, the association's Paris representative. "Those who died had to fly Yemenia if they wanted to get to the Comoros this summer...