AP통신에 따르면 프랑스와 벨기에 당국은 안전성이 의심스러운 15개 항공사의 명단을 발표하고 이들 항공사가 自國의 공항을 사용하지 못하게 했다. 이는 최근 빈발하고 있는 여객기 추락사고에 자극을 받아 취한 조치로 보인다. 블랙리스트에 오른 불안한 항공사중에는 북한의 고려 항공사도 포함되어 있다.

*프랑스의 블랙리스트: Air Koryo of North Korea; Air St. Thomas of the U.S. Virgin Islands; International Air Services of Liberia; Thailand's Phuket Airlines; and Linhas Aereas de Mocambique and Transairways, both from Mozambique.

*벨기에의 블랙리스트: Africa Lines of the Central African Republic; Air Memphis from Egypt; Air Van Airlines of Armenia; Central Air Express from Congo; Libya's ICTTPW; International Air Tours Limited from Nigeria; Johnsons Air Limited of Ghana; Silverback Cargo Freighters from Rwanda; and South Airlines of Ukraine.







France, Belgium blacklist airlines

Monday, August 29, 2005; Posted: 11:07 a.m. EDT (15:07 GMT)

PARIS, France (AP) -- France and Belgium have issued blacklists of airlines prohibited from using their airports, in an attempt to allay public fears about flying after a recent series of deadly crashes.

The French list comprises six companies from the U.S. Virgin Islands, Thailand, North Korea, Mozambique and Liberia. Belgium's list released Monday includes nine airlines from Egypt, Armenia, Congo, Libya, Nigeria, Ghana, Rwanda, Ukraine and the Central African Republic.

Swiss civil aviation officials said they planned to release a similar list Thursday.

Proposals for a European blacklist were still working their way through lawmaking institutions, prompting individual countries to take action in the meantime.

Starting Sept. 8, different European Union member states will meet in Brussels to work on harmonizing rules to ban or suspend a company's flights, EU Transport Commissioner Jacques Barrot said Monday.

Maxime Coffin, test director at the French civil aviation authority, DGAC, said he hoped the French list would speed up Europe's efforts. Though all the airlines had been banned in recent years, France had never before made a blacklist public.

'We also hope this list will persuade foreign companies who want to come to France to be more rigorous,' Coffin told a news conference.

Thailand's Phuket Airways, one of the airlines banned in France, demanded to know what criteria France used to judge it.

'I really don't understand what is the meaning of unsafe. Unsafe for what? Unsafe for operations or unsafe for what? Because we have never had a serious incident or accident, so I would like to ask back to the authorities what is the meaning of unsafe?' Captain Chawanit Chiamcharoenvut, executive vice president of Phuket Air, said at the company office in Bangkok.

Safety specialists said, however, that because air accidents are relatively rare, airline records failed to tell the whole story.

In France, many questioned the reliability of the blacklists.

'Publishing lists is completely ineffective,' said Marc Chernet, president of an association for victims of a Flash Airlines plane crash in the Red Sea in June 2004. The plane, heading to Paris, crashed after taking off from Sharm El-Sheik, Egypt, killing 148 people, mostly French tourists.

He suggested the French blacklist be replaced with a system of 'security grades' to rank airlines on their overall safety.

'A company that is unable to fly can easily make an agreement to fly in another company's name,' he told Europe-1 radio.

Other European countries have rejected national blacklists. The Netherlands, for example, says such a move should be the result of a joint effort by the 25 EU countries.

'France and Belgium have announced their decision to publish a blacklist of unsafe airlines on the Internet. The Netherlands doesn't support that,' the Dutch Transport Ministry said in a statement Monday. Instead, 'it wants the European Commission to come up with a list of airlines that would be banned from the EU air space.'

The French and Belgian measures were announced after a series of five aviation accidents in the past few months, including one involving a Colombian-registered charter that crashed in Venezuela, killing 152 French citizens from the Caribbean island of Martinique.

On Saturday, a charter flight from Turkish company Fly Air was grounded at Paris' Roissy airport with tire problems and a small fuel leak. Passengers were either reimbursed or flown out on a different plane Monday. That company was not on France's blacklist.

France's list of banned airlines is: Air Koryo of North Korea; Air St. Thomas of the U.S. Virgin Islands; International Air Services of Liberia; Thailand's Phuket Airlines; and Linhas Aereas de Mocambique and Transairways, both from Mozambique.
On the Belgian list were Africa Lines of the Central African Republic; Air Memphis from Egypt; Air Van Airlines of Armenia; Central Air Express from Congo; Libya's ICTTPW; International Air Tours Limited from Nigeria; Johnsons Air Limited of Ghana; Silverback Cargo Freighters from Rwanda; and South Airlines of Ukraine.

The U.S. has a slightly different system that focuses on countries rather than airlines, and uses aviation safety standards set by the International Civil Aviation Organization, a United Nations agency headquartered in Montreal. Twenty-six of the 100 countries that have been assessed do not meet ICAO standards, most in Africa, South America and the Caribbean.