Europe has a good safety record founded on strict standards

Published on Wednesday 20 August 2008 22:46

STRICT European air safety standards have helped to maintain its good aviation safety record compared with the rest of the world.

The Madrid crash is thought to be Spain's worst since 1985, when 148 people aboard an Iberia Boeing 727 were killed near Bilbao airport.

The last major European air crash was almost exactly three years ago, when a Helios Airways flight from Cyprus to Prague crashed near Athens with 121 people on board. It is thought a drop in cabin pressure caused the incident.

In 2001, 71 people, many of them children on a school trip, died when a Russian Tupolev 154 aircraft collided with a Boeing 757 transport plane over southern Germany.

The same year an SAS passenger aircraft collided with a small plane in heavy fog on the runway at Linate airport in Milan, killing 118 people.

Europe's other major crash of the decade involved an Air France Concorde, which came down shortly after taking off from Paris in 2000, killing 113 people, including four on the ground.

A European Union blacklist has banned 92 airlines operating "flying coffins" from its airports. The move two years ago followed a spate of crashes and was aimed as a pre-emptive strike against carriers, many of them African, to prevent them launching European operations. Jacques Barrot, the then European transport commissioner, who announced the 25-nation ban, said: "This blacklist will keep dubious airlines out of Europe. It will also make sure that all airlines operating in Europe's sky meet the highest safety standards."

Chris Yates, an aviation safety expert at Jane's Transport, said the aircraft involved in the Madrid crash had a good safety record. He said:

"When you consider the amount of aircraft built and operated, it is one of the most remarkably safe aircraft."

Mr Yates said the investigation may focus on the plane's engines.

He said: "The black boxes could solve the mystery if they are recoverable, but the intensity of the fire could have severely damaged them. A lot ground around the aircraft was on fire, which indicates a substantial fuel spillage.

"It's very difficult to speculate in the early stages, but quite evidently a key focus for air accident investigators will be an engine catching fire, but also reports that the pilots may well have delayed departure for some technical issue.

"If that report proves true, then the air accident investigators will be poring over maintenance records with even more attention than they would do to see if any problems are indicated."