France had banned Comoros crash plane in 2007

PARIS (Reuters) - France banned the Yemenia A310-300 Airbus that crashed near Comoros on Tuesday from French soil after faults were found in a test in 2007, Transport Minister Dominique Bussereau said.

He said he was investigating whether picking up passengers in France in one plane and then transferring them to a possibly less safe one in another location was allowable.

"A few years ago we excluded this plane from national soil because we considered that it had a number of irregularities," Bussereau told parliament.

"The question we are asking ... is whether you can collect people in a normal way on French territory and then put them in a plane that does not ensure their security. We do not want this to happen again."

Faults were detected in France in 2007 on the A310.

Yemen's transport minister said the aircraft had undergone a thorough inspection in May under Airbus supervision.

"It was a comprehensive inspection carried out in Yemen ... with experts from Airbus," Khaled Ibrahim al-Wazeer told Reuters by telephone from the Yemeni capital Sanaa.

Many of the passengers began their journey in Paris or Marseille aboard a different Yemenia plane, an A330. They switched to the A310 in Sanaa.

Bussereau had said in an early morning radio interview that the plane was not at fault in the crash.

A European Commission official said the 2007 examination of the A310 had sparked an inquiry into Yemenia's safety record.

And the European Aviation Safety Agency said the EU had suspended permission for Yemenia to service EU-registered planes last February after it failed a set of audit inspections.

Although Yemenia operated the A310, it was owned by International Lease Finance Corp. It was registered in Yemen.

FRENCH INVESTIGATORS

The aircraft crashed into the sea with 153 people on board, including 66 French nationals, as it tried to land in bad weather on the Indian Ocean island of Grande Comore on Tuesday, officials said.

France's BEA air accident board said it was sending a team of investigators accompanied by Airbus experts to the site.

It was the second crash this month involving an Airbus aircraft and a large numbers of French passengers.

The BEA is due to publish a preliminary report on Thursday on the loss of an Air France A330-200 on June 1. The plane crashed during an Atlantic storm while en route from Brazil to Paris, killing all 228 people on board.

Yemenia also operates two leased A330-200s.

In 2007 it placed an order for 10 next-generation Airbus A350-800 wide-body jets, worth $2 billion at list prices, to jumpstart what it described as "ambitious growth plans."

Airbus said the crashed A310 was built in 1990 and had been operated by Yemenia since October 1999.

It was one of four operated by the same airline, two of which were leased, according to Airbus order data.

The aircraft had accumulated approximately 51,900 flight hours in some 17,300 flights, the planemaker said.

Its engines were built by Pratt and Whitney, a unit of U.S. conglomerate United Technologies.

Designed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the A310 was the second model developed by Airbus -- then a four-nation plane building consortium and now fully owned by European aerospace group EADS.