CAS is on the list of “ flying coffins ”, a list of unsafe airlines drawn up by the European Commission. The EU’s airline blacklist is supposed to stop unsafe planes from entering European airspace.
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 Balcklist is a story of hope, and that’s probably why it made its way around the world so quickly.
Wednesday’s ban and earlier similar orders rankle many Africans. 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.
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.
Even many of Africa’s larger airlines fly secondhand aircraft purchased from overseas.
Many other airlines, particularly in vast Congo, fly rickety old jets or propeller-driven planes, including some old military aircraft converted to passenger aircraft with the addition of plastic patio-style chairs.
One solution might be banning castoff aircraft from former Soviet-bloc nations. Spare parts can be hard to obtain and some of the aging planes’ maintenance documentation has been lost.
“We’ve witnessed accidents in countries with conflict, like Congo, Angola and Sudan,” says Elijah Hingosso, an official with Nairobi, Kenya-based African Airlines Association. “Many of these flights took place in areas outside of government control, so there’s no oversight. We’ve also tended to notice in the past that many aircraft come from the former USSR.”
“We’re urging governments to stop getting these old aircraft,” said Hingosso, who says the number of passengers is growing at between 6 and 7 percent annually—slightly higher than the global rate.
There are bright spots, including South African Airways, Kenya Airways and Ethiopian Airlines. Many African pilots who have honed their skills on the continent’s cracked runways are known as skilled navigators of crisis zones. A South African crew runs a route between Amman, Jordan, and Iraq’s Baghdad, where the plane approaches the runway in a tight downward corkscrew to avoid ground fire.
