Egypt's Air Memphis latest to be banned after main gear tyre burst on 707 taking off from Cairo bound for Ostend
As the European Parliament voted in favour of proposals to name and shame foreign airlines that fail to meet international safety standards, France's air accident bureau BEA confirmed that the Egyptian airline Luxor Air remains banned from French airspace (Flight International, 6-12 April). A Luxor Boeing MD-83 nearly hit tall buildings in Nantes, western France, last month as it approached the airport well below the permitted height.
The European Council, having resisted open publication of safety information about non-EU airlines, finally accepted a draft regulation in January and the European Parliament approved it on 1 April. The rule will become required procedure in all EU states within two years of its adoption, but is expected to become practice in some states before then. One provision is that any EU state that bans an airline notifies the European Commission, which can then extend a ban throughout the EU.
These laws originated from a fatal 1996 crash of a Boeing 757 operated by Turkish charter airline Birgenair carrying German tourists from the Dominican Republic, but the final regulatory push started in January when 133 French passengers died departing Sharm el Sheikh, near the Red Sea, in a 737 belonging to Egyptian charter carrier Flash Air. The carrier had been banned by Switzerland but the information had not been shared.
Now Belgium has barred Egyptian freight carrier Air Memphis following a 2 April incident at Cairo, Egypt in which the right main gear tyres of a Boeing 707-320C (SU-AVZ) burst and the aircraft veered off the runway. The aircraft was departing for a regular flight to Ostend, Belgium.
The near crash of the Luxor Air Boeing MD-83 occurred in poor weather after midnight on 21 March. The aircraft strayed well off the official let-down track for its cleared VOR/DME approach to runway 21 at Nantes. According to the BEA, it then descended through the 500ft (200m) cloudbase over the city centre when it should have been at a minimum of 1,730ft. This has been confirmed by radar recordings because the aircraft's flight data recorder contained no detail. The MD-83, with 110 people on board, flew within a few hundred metres of two tall buildings. Airport controllers alerted the crew, then provided radar vectors to position the aircraft for a second approach.
DAVID LEARMOUNT / LONDON
Source: Flight International
