The European Commission is planning to introduce a European Union-wide blacklist of airlines whose aircraft are grounded for safety reasons, Transport Commissioner Jacques Barrot said on Thursday.
France, 152 of whose nationals perished when a Colombian charter plane crashed on Tuesday in Venezuela, said there was already support for the measure among major European countries.
Barrot told France Inter radio that Tuesday's "terrible catastrophe" showed an airlines blacklist was now vital.
He said the blacklist could be set up under an EU accord predating the crash that will make sharing information on air safety obligatory.
"As soon as the European Parliament has ratified this agreement, we think the European air safety agency will be able to organize this information sharing," Barrot said.
In practice, "it would have to take the form of a blacklist, as in the United States".
French Transport Minister Dominique Perben expressed support for the idea, telling RTL radio: "We must manage to set up what they call a 'blacklist' of airline companies.
"Obviously we need the agreement of all 25 member states, I'm pushing hard, like Jacques Barrot, like Germany, like Italy, like Britain."
Operated by privately-owned West Caribbean Airways, which is based in the Colombian city of Medellin, the crashed plane was carrying tourists home to the French Caribbean island of Martinique from Panama when it plummeted to the ground in western Venezuela after reporting engine trouble. It was one of the Latin American country's worst air disasters.
West Caribbean's safety and aircraft maintenance record has since come under intense scrutiny.
The MD-82 airliner had passed a safety check by Colombian authorities on Monday. But the airline has been penalized before for excessive weight and safety violations.
Perben said French air crash investigators would work with their Venezuelan counterparts to decipher the flight data recorders which have been recovered from the crash site.
Perben said this week the MD-82 had passed two inspections while on French territory, documents daily Le Parisien said were to be seized by French authorities as part of an official French judicial investigation into the deaths of its nationals.
Eight passengers and crew died in March when an aircraft belonging to West Caribbean crashed shortly after takeoff.
West Caribbean, which operates two McDonnell Douglas MD-81s, two ATR42s and several smaller aircraft, said on Wednesday it had grounded its only remaining operational aircraft, a Czech-built LET 410 turboprop.
(Reuters)
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