Yemen Plane Crashes in Indian Ocean With 153 Aboard (Updating) By Henry Meyer and Massoud A. Derhally
June 30 (Bloomberg) — An Airbus from Yemen’s national airline with 153 passengers and crew members on board crashed in the Indian Ocean just before it was due to land in the Comoros Islands.
The Airbus SAS A310 plane was 15 minutes from touching down in the archipelago’s capital, Moroni, when it plunged into the ocean today, a Yemenia official, Taha al-Ashwal, said in a telephone interview from Yemen’s capital, Sana’a. One survivor was found, the airline said, as rescue efforts continued.
The passengers, most of them Comorians, began their journey from Paris to Sana’a on an Airbus A330 that had a stopover in Marseille. They were transferred to the A310 for the final leg of the flight from Sana’a to the Comoros, the airline said. The A310 that crashed had been barred from use in France after a 2007 inspection by French officials.
The inspection noted “a certain number of faults,” French Transportation Minister Dominique Bussereau said in an interview with France’s i-tele channel without elaborating on the problems. He said the airline was being monitored by European Union authorities.
Yemeni officials said the plane crashed in stormy weather. The crash is the second involving an Airbus in a month. An Air France Airbus A330-200 en route to Paris from Rio de Janeiro crashed into the Atlantic June 1, killing all 228 people on board.
Wreckage Spotted
“We never had problems with the plane. It was purely weather,” Yemenia Chairman Abdulkalek Saleh Al-Kadi said in a telephone interview from Sana’a. Al-Kadi said he couldn’t confirm a report by Agence France-Presse that the survivor is a child.
Wreckage was spotted off the coast and some bodies were seen floating about 30 kilometers (18 miles) from Moroni, AFP reported, citing senior aviation official Mohammad Abdel Kader.
“The weather was bad at that time and it’s still now,” Yemenia’s Al-Kadi said. Winds were gusting as high as 113 kilometers (71 miles) per hour and the sea was rough, AFP cited the aviation official as saying.
Officials “lost contact” with the aircraft, carrying 142 passengers and a crew of 11, at about 1 a.m. local time, said al-Ashwal.
Most of the passengers were of Comorian origin from France, the airline said. Sixty-six French nationals were on the flight, the French Foreign Ministry said.
Northwest of Madagascar
The Comoros Islands are located off the southeastern coast of Africa, northwest of Madagascar. About 200,000 Comorians live in France, according to the French government.
“The Comoros are a poor and small country that can’t afford to have its own airline, so it’s dependent on whatever airlines fly in the Indian Ocean,” Stephane Salors, the country’s consul general in Marseille, where a large Comorian community lives, said on i-tele. “There have been many complaints over the years about Yemenia,” he said, adding that the A310 was an “old generation plane” that had other accidents in the past.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy dispatched airplanes and ships from Reunion Island to help with the search. In a statement today, he expressed his profound shock and assigned Transport Minister Bussereau to monitor the situation.
France today sent a military plane with a medical team and deep sea divers aboard. Tomorrow, a naval patrol boat and a helicopter carrier will be on the scene, the Defense Ministry said.
Investigating Team
Yemenia sent a team to the Comoros Islands to investigate the crash, said the company’s chairman.
Yemenia runs four A310-300 that are leased, according to the Arab Air Carriers Organization. The oldest plane was built in 1990 and the newest in 1997. The airline, which is 49 percent owned by Saudi Arabian Airlines, also operates leased Airbus A330-200 and Boeing 737-800 aircraft.
Airbus SAS said the aircraft in the Yemenia crash was an A310-300 that left its production line in 1990. The plane had been operated by Yemenia since 1999, the planemaker, based in Toulouse, France, said in an e-mailed statement. The BEA, the French Aviation Accidents Bureau, said in a statement that it’s sending a team of investigators accompanied by Airbus specialists to Moroni.
Calls to the government in Comoros weren’t answered.
Yemen is the poorest Arab nation, with about 40 percent of the population living on less than $2 a day, according to the U.K. Department for International Development.
The Comoros Islands are divided into an independent nation, the Union of the Comoros, and the island of Mayotte, a French territory claimed by the Union of the Comoros.
To contact the reporters on this story: Henry Meyer in Dubai at hmeyer4@bloomberg.net; Massoud A. Derhally in Amman, Jordan at mderhally@bloomberg.net
Last Updated: June 30, 2009 07:35 EDT
