Protests force airline blacklists

Protests by French air passengers, worried that they are being corralled aboard dangerous cut-price charter flights, are helping to drive a European crackdown on unsafe air travel.

Three times in less than two months, French holidaymakers have walked off planes stuck on the tarmac with technical problems and staged protests at airline terminals, demanding to be flown to their destination by a different carrier.

In full media blaze, 235 passengers last week refused point-blank to get back on board an A300 plane at Paris' Orly airport after the aircraft, operated by a Turkish firm called Fly Air, ran into engine problems 20 minutes after takeoff and headed back for repairs.

On July 16, 97 out of 163 passengers refused to travel in a charter from Hurghada in Egypt to Paris operated by Egyptian charter firm AMC Airlines. They walked off the McDonnell-Douglas jet after it had made an abortive attempt at takeoff, with flickering cabin lighting, one of its three generators out of action and without air conditioning.

"No one had any trust" in the plane, said passenger Karine Bourseul. Her husband decided to stay with the flight as their two daughters were waiting for them in Paris. But they agreed that she should take the next available plane with another company "so that one parent should be alive to take care of the children" if the AMC flight crashed.

The jet's charterer, Air Master, "blamed panic among a few passengers" for a "regrettable" incident. The plane was checked out by French Government inspectors after it arrived in Paris, and they deemed it airworthy.

In another incident, passengers who had paid for a flight with the Greek national carrier Olympic Airways from Paris to Crete via Athens found their flight had been contracted out to a low-cost charter called Starjet.com.

Frederic Namur, an architect, says he boarded the ageing Lockheed TriStar and found that none of the flight crew appeared to speak French or English, parts of the cabin's false ceiling were hanging down and some of the emergency cabin lighting didn't work.

Backed by other passengers, Namur took himself and his two children off the plane and insisted, after a confrontation with Olympic Airways ground staff, on being given a seat on a regular flight. The Starjet plane later took off but turned back almost immediately after takeoff, with an engine on fire.

The movement has since been boosted by four crashes in August involving minority airlines. Public attention is focusing on small price-cutting charter companies that have sprung up around Europe and the Mediterranean rim to ferry holidaymakers to seaside resorts. The steam is building for Government action, including "naming and shaming" unsafe airlines, to guide holidaymakers booking their flight and pressure the mavericks.

The European Commission has set a year's end deadline for agreeing on the criteria for an EU-wide blacklist, but national approaches are so different that a deal looks very unlikely. Countries are moving ahead in piecemeal fashion.

France on Monday said it had banned five passenger carriers and Belgium named nine cargo companies. But not only are the lists different, the names also are at variance with a list of blacklisted airlines already drawn up by Britain. And their approach is different from that taken by the United States, which names countries rather than airlines where civil aviation regulations are deemed inadequate. Switzerland publishes its blacklist today.

Tour operators and industry experts are sceptical about the national approach, noting that a firm banned in one European country could still land in another and send on its passengers to their final destination by train or another carrier. And a dodgy charter firm forced out of business by the blacklist may simply re-emerge with a different name.