The tragic air crash at Sharm El-Sheikh Saturday has thrown up the deeply disturbing news that there are no fewer than six airlines which have been banned from flying into or over three European countries because of the dangerous condition of their aircraft. However no civil aviation authority is prepared to say who they are. Unfortunately because of the Egyptian tragedy, we know now that one of them was Flash Airlines.
Both Flash’s Boeing 737’s were inspected by the Swiss civil aviation authorities in 2002 and because of serious concerns over poor engine maintenance, steering systems and landing gear, both planes were banned from Swiss airspace. The Swiss have also banned three other airlines operating a total of 26 aircraft, while the Belgians and Dutch have also banned one airline each. Yet the names of these carriers have not been made public.
This is a deeply unsatisfactory situation which means that when passengers board the aircraft of smaller, less well-known carriers, they are truly flying in the dark. This ill-judged behavior by civil aviation authorities is hard to fathom. If planes are deemed to be unsafe, then they should not be allowed to fly until they are safe. The two Flash Airline Boeings should have been impounded until repaired. This is what happens with shipping. When a vessel fails an inspection it is “arrested” at the port where it is checked and held until the faults are corrected. If, however, the faulty aircraft are permitted to depart with nothing being done, then surely it is the responsibility of the authorities to publish the name of the airline, thus warning passengers of possible dangers.
The black box, when it is recovered, will possibly explain what happened to the flight. There have been problems in the past with the world’s best-selling commercial aircraft, the Boeing 737-300 — usually problems with engine failure after takeoff and rudder faults. The US authorities insisted US carriers make modifications. There have been two recent Boeing 737-300 crashes, in Algeria and the Sudan. Analysts say the circumstances were similar to those of the Sharm El-Sheikh disaster. Had the carriers involved voluntarily made the modifications that the US Federal Aviation authorities had insisted upon for their own airlines?
Within hours of Saturday’s tragedy, the Egyptian authorities were rushing to protect their country’s tourist industry by insisting that this was certainly not a terrorist act. The irony is that the image of Egyptian tourism is likely to suffer almost as much if the tragedy proves to have been caused by the poor maintenance standards of an airline. Nevertheless, the biggest culprits in this horror story are the European civil aviation authorities who withheld the names of dangerous airlines. They should now identify the other five carriers.
