The minister also said that by the end of the year rules would come into effect in the country under which "tour operators and charter companies, when selling a ticket, will be required to inform passengers who is operating the flight." The French Transport Ministry promises to push for the adoption of the same measures by all European Union member states on a collective basis. The ministry sees its strategic task as "strengthening France's driving role in European aviation safety organizations."
Dominique Perben's statement is a reaction to the crash of a plane belonging to the Colombian airline West Caribbean Airways, which went down on August 16 in the town of La Curuchita in Venezuela. The tragedy claimed the lives of 160 people on board. All of them, except for the crew members, were French citizens and were heading home from Panama to the overseas department of Martinique.
The idea of a Europe-wide blacklist of foreign airlines was first put forward by France after another disaster in which its citizens died. On January 3, 2004, a plane belonging to the local airline Flash Airlines crashed into the sea while taking off from the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh. Most of the 148 victims were French tourists. During the investigation, it turned out that two years earlier Switzerland had banned the company from its airspace due to safety violations found on a Flash Airlines aircraft (though not the one that later crashed in the Red Sea, but another one - the company had only two planes).
The practice now generally accepted in the world of commercial aviation treats flight bans as essentially a "private matter" for the airlines and aviation administrations concerned. There is no systematic exchange of such information between the aviation authorities of different countries. Such facts are usually not disclosed to the general public, either.
The French aviation authorities reasoned that if information about Flash Airlines' past problems in Switzerland had been publicly available, the victims would have had a reason to choose a different carrier for their flight. To ensure the lesson was not wasted, they proposed creating and publishing a Europe-wide blacklist. However, over a year and a half, the idea was never implemented at the EU level, and now France has decided to take the first step alone.
French President Jacques Chirac supported the decision to tighten control over foreign airlines' aircraft and the intention to amend the country's aviation safety legislation. In particular, the president mentioned the need to increase the frequency and strictness of inspections of airliners on French territory, to publish a list of airlines whose operations are banned in France, and to introduce a "blue label" system for airlines that voluntarily adopt certain safety standards.