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



By Jacob Chatterjee
31 March 2006 @ 8:03 pm IST

The ban on 92 airlines (most of them originating from Africa) by the European Union (EU) from its airspace highlights the unsolved problem faced by the impoverished nations of Africa where planes are six times more likely to crash than elsewhere and passengers fly with a prayer.


Slok gambia
A plane belonging to Gambian carrier Slok Air prepares for takeoff at Leopold Sedar Senghor Airport in Dakar, Senegal Friday March 24, 2006. The EU ban may hit the African aviation business hard and taint the image of those airlines that have maintained world-quality standards of safety and operations.
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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.

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