EU's ban on African 'flying coffins' raises safety concerns and questions

In announcing the ban on virtually all aircraft overseen by civil aviation authorities in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Equatorial Guinea, Swaziland and Congo from landing at European airports, EU Transport Commissioner Jacques Barrot labeled many of the planes "flying coffins."

The recent ban and earlier similar orders will rankle many Africans for they point out that most of the banned airlines - like Thom's Airways from Congo - no longer operate and never fly to Europe anyway, while Africans have little choice but to use them to hop around the world's poorest continent.

Badara Allieu Tarrawallie, the deputy director of the civil aviation in Sierra Leone, which had 13 airlines banned, said his country had not had a safety audit by the main aviation-industry oversight group since the end of the country's brutal 1989-2002 civil war.

Still, "every state has sovereignty over its airspace," he said.

The aviation industry in most African nations suffer because of the same reasons: poverty, conflict and poor governance. And, little is being done to solve it.

According to Associated Press (AP), in Nigeria late last year, two planes flying domestic routes crashed within seven weeks of each other killing 224 people, including dozens of schoolchildren heading home for Christmas holidays. The causes of those crashes have not been determined, but Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo has referred to an intelligence report detailing safety problems involving Nigerian airlines, including planes experiencing landing gear trouble.

In December, Obasanjo also blamed corruption for some of the troubles in his country's aviation industry and called in international experts for a safety review. Most other nations, though, are yet to move their feet.

In the wake of economic liberalization, many governments are trying to adapt and give in to privatization, to meet the demands of faster-than average passenger growth, but fail to strengthen regulatory mechanisms.

"You've got the general problem of poverty and lack of government capacity. We've gone far in one way, but not the other," AP quoted Princeton Lyman, a former U.S. ambassador to Nigeria, currently a Council on Foreign Affairs fellow, as saying.