TALLINN - Estonia's Civil Aviation Administration said it would not ban Air Memphis, an Egypt-based carrier, from operating flights despite the deficiencies detected on the company's aircraft.
The defects that have been uncovered do not provide sufficient grounds for banning the airline, officials said.
Rein Porro, deputy director general of the administration, said Europe lacked common regulations for determining which defects and deficiencies can serve as a basis for banning specific airlines. Thus any regulator has to be extremely cautious when taking this kind of action, he stressed.
The Netherlands banned flights of Turkey's Onur Air, but this was preceded by several years of proceedings and remarkably more flight incidents than with Air Memphis aircraft, Porro gave as an example. "And even after that, the topic reached the tables of the top politicians of the two countries," Porro told the Baltic News Service.
He added, however, that the Civil Aviation Administration has taken matters related to Air Memphis under very close scrutiny, and its inspectors are prepared to carry out in-depth checks on its aircraft should the company resume flights to Estonia.
The safety of Air Memphis aircraft came under question this spring when the Marhaba Tours travel agency started to shuttle Estonian tourists to Egypt on Air Memphis planes. Technical malfunctions were reported several times, the most serious of them forcing the April 8 departure to return to Tallinn shortly after takeoff.
In May, Marhaba Tours stopped chartering Air Memphis planes.
