SWITZERLAND: Two aircraft operated by the Egyptian Flash Airlines, one of whose planes crashed into the Red Sea on Saturday killing all 148 people on board, were found unsafe in 2002 by Swiss aviation authorities, the Swiss said yesterday.
In Cairo, Flash officials were not immediately available to comment on the Swiss report. But they have said the doomed charter plane was one of only two that Flash has operated in recent years, including all of 2002, although Swiss officials were unable to confirm positively that it was one of those they had inspected.
The aircraft, bound for Cairo and Paris, crashed after taking off from Egypt's Sharm el-Sheikh resort. Yesterday, the Swiss Federal Office for Civil Aviation said it had inspected one of the company's aircraft in April 2002 and found that navigation documents were missing, fuel reserves were not calculated to international standards and the signposting of emergency exits was partly "in unusable condition".
"In addition, obvious maintenance deficiencies were found in the areas of the landing gear, the engines and the aircraft steering," it said in a statement. It said the inspection of a second Flash Airlines aircraft in October 2002 had revealed "essentially the same defects". After the airline failed to provide sufficient proof that it had remedied the defects, it was barred from landing in Switzerland a few days later, the office said.
Meanwhile, a French salvage operation made a slow start yesterday as Egypt again defended the safety record of the airline.
French experts had planned to deploy a submersible robot to look for the flight recorders which should throw light on what went wrong with the charter plane now lying in deep water.
But Mr Alex Morachinni, the French navy's chief diver, said the search team would first try to fix the position of the plane using a system which can pick up the beeping sound emitted by the plane's flight recorders.
Egyptian Civil Aviation Minister Mr Ahmed Mohamed Shafiq Zaki said again yesterday that the Swiss had let a Flash Airlines plane take off from Zurich with 148 Swiss tourists in October 2002 after giving the plane a safety check. "That means it was 100 per cent safe," he added.
An anonymous caller claiming to represent a previously un- known group called Ansar al-Haq (Followers of the Truth) said it had brought the plane down and would attack Air France planes if the French government does not drop plans for a law banning Islamic headscarves.