Translated material
The sky of Europe is black for Ukrainians
The ban on access of foreign airlines to EU countries has been updated
The European Union yesterday published the eighth version of its blacklist of foreign airlines that are banned from European airspace for failing to comply with flight safety standards. There are no Russian companies on the list. The CIS is represented (as, indeed, in previous versions of the list ) by the entire civil aviation of the Republic of Kyrgyzstan and three large Ukrainian air carriers.The EU began maintaining a blacklist of unsafe foreign airlines in 2004, after several plane crashes occurred in different parts of the world with large casualties among European tourists. The immediate cause was the crash of an Egyptian airliner in Sharm el-Sheikh on January 3, 2004. The tragedy claimed the lives of 148 people, mostly French tourists. It turned out that Flash Airlines, which owned the crashed plane, had been banned from flying to Switzerland since 2002. In this country, inspectors found serious violations on two Flash Airlines planes (the company only had two of them). After the tragedy in Sharm el-Sheikh, the French Ministry of Transport said that it was not aware of the harsh decision of its Swiss colleagues. In order to coordinate the policies of European countries towards unsafe foreign air carriers, a set of measures was adopted, including the introduction of a blacklist.
Since then, the contents of the list have been updated every six months. In the intervals between updates, experts from European aviation authorities carry out tireless inspection work, identifying among the “penalized” companies those who have corrected themselves and can be readmitted to European destinations, and among carriers with a positive past, those who have weakened their attention to safety and, This means that he must be subject to a preventive ban.
Yesterday, fate (and European inspectors) smiled on the Iranian airline Mahan Airlines, which was among the banned ones. In a rare gesture of goodwill amid current tensions between Iran and the West, the European Commission lifted the ban on Mahan. The move was made "in light of the significant efforts and progress the carrier has made," it said in a statement released yesterday.
In the case of Ukraine, the European Commission did not find such progress. Ukraine is represented in the new version of the list (as well as in the old one) by three airlines: Ukrainian Mediterranean Airlines, Ukraine Cargo Airways and Volare. All three are quite large companies by Ukrainian standards: the first is passenger, the last two are cargo. The European Commission noted that Ukraine Cargo Airways “has not yet been able to successfully implement its corrective action plan.” No official comments were made about the other two companies. They simply remained among the banned ones, like Ukraine Cargo.
“The Commission reminded the Ukrainian authorities of the need to tighten compliance with safety standards,” the statement said. Ukraine features prominently in the section of the EU blacklist that lists individual offending companies. There are eight such carriers in total. Three Ukrainian companies coexist there with the national airlines of North Korea, Afghanistan, Angola and two more little-known African companies.
The blacklist section is more extensive, where foreign carriers are banned by entire countries. Kyrgyzstan received this dubious honor from the CIS. In addition, the European skies are closed to civil aviation from Equatorial Guinea, Indonesia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Swaziland, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Gabon, with the exception of two airlines from this last country.
There are no Russian airlines on the EU blacklist, just as they were not there before. Although in the past European inspectors had complaints against some of the domestic carriers, the Russian aviation authorities managed to allay the concerns of their colleagues in a working manner. Last year, Russia decided to use its power, in whole or in part, to ban flights to Europe by nine Russian airlines that were found to have deviations from EU safety standards. The meaning of this measure was that, unlike the EU blacklist, Russia could lift such a ban on its own (which was done when the company was reported to have corrected the violations).