When I Was Young

Posted: 30 June 2009 1733 hrs

A man holds a relative of passengers of the Yemenia Airlines Airbus 310-300 that crashed near Comoros.

MORONI - A Yemeni Airbus A310 jet carrying 153 people crashed into rough seas as it came in to land in the Comoros islands early Tuesday but rescuers plucked a child survivor from the water, officials said.

It was the second time in less than a month that an Airbus has crashed into the ocean. This time French authorities said the Yemeni carrier had been under surveillance and that problems had been reported with the jet.

Bodies and wreckage from the Yemenia airline flight were spotted in the Indian Ocean near the island archipelago capital, Moroni, aviation officials said.

But a child among the 142 passengers and 11 crew on Flight IY 626 was rescued alive, a surgeon at the main Moroni hospital, Issa Ben Imani, told AFP.

Imani said the child was being taken to land where an ambulance waited to take the child to hospital.

Arfachad Salim, a rescue coordinator for the Comoros Red Crescent, confirmed that the child was alive and added that local fishermen had also found wreckage, passengers handbags and other effects.

In Sanaa, Yemenia's deputy managing director for operations Mohammed al-Sumairi said three bodies had also been recovered.

The long gruelling Flight IY 626 had started in Paris early Monday and made stops in Marseille, Sanaa and Djibouti before heading to Moroni.

Moroni international airport control tower lost contact with the jet just before it was due to land amid bad weather, airport director Hadji Mmadi Ali told AFP.

French civil aviation officials said 66 passengers were French. Three small babies were also among the passengers, officials said. France sent two navy ships and a plane from its nearby Indian Ocean territories to help the rescue.

"Bodies were seen floating on the surface of the water and a fuel slick was also spotted about 16 or 17 nautical miles from Moroni," senior Yemeni civil aviation official Mohammad Abdel Kader told reporters in Sanaa.

Kader said the wind was blowing in gusts of up to 115 kilometres an hour when the disaster happened.

"Weather conditions were bad," he said. "The sea was rough."

The Yemenia flight left Sanaa at 9:45pm (1845 GMT) on Monday and contact was lost at 1:51am on Tuesday (2251 GMT Monday), Kader said.

"Yemenia regrets to announce the missing of its flight No IY626 from Sanaa to Moroni with 142 passengers and 11 crew onboard Airbus 310-300," the airline announced on its website.

Airbus, which is still reeling from the crash of an Air France A330-320 into the Atlantic on June 1 with 228 people on board, set up a crisis cell straight away and sent investigators to the Comoros.

No cause has yet been announced for the Air France disaster. The black box flight recorders have yet to be found and their signal is due to stop emitting on July 2.

The European plane maker said the jet which crashed off Moroni was made in 1990 and had been operated by Yemenia since 1999.

France's Transport Minister Dominique Bussereau said inspectors had noted numerous faults on the Yemenia jet and the airline was being closely monitored by EU authorities.

"The A310 in question had been inspected in France in 2007 by the DGAC (French civil aviation authority) and a certain number of faults had been noted," Dominique Bussereau.

"The plane had not since then reappeared in our country," he told i-tele news.

Yemenia was not on an EU blacklist "but was being subjected to closer inspection by us and was due to soon be heard by the security committee of the European Union," he said.

Airbus said in a statement the jet had accumulated approximately 51,900 hours in the air from some 17,300 flights.

Yemen Airways was founded in 1961 before the formation in 1978 of Yemenia, which is 51 percent owned by the Yemeni government and 49 percent by Saudi Arabia, according to its website.

The Yemenia flight started at Paris Charles de Gaulle on Monday morning, using a more modern Airbus A330-200 for the first legs of the journey.

The plane flew to Marseille in southern France, where there is a large Comoran community, and then went on to Sanaa. There were about 100 passengers on board when it left Marseille, Yemeni civil aviation official Kader said.

In the Yemen capital, people from various Arab states joined the flight and the passengers changed to the Airbus A310 which first flew to Djibouti.

A crisis task force was set up at Paris Charles de Gaulle airport while psychologists were on hand at Marseille's airport to comfort the families of passengers on the plane.

- AFP/ir

From ChannelNewsAsia.com; see the source article here.