June 30 (Bloomberg) -- A Yemeni Airbus that crashed into the Indian Ocean with 153 people aboard had been barred from flying in France and the carrier, Yemenia, now faces a safety assessment by the European Union. A teenage girl is the only survivor found so far.

The Airbus SAS A310 was 15 minutes from landing in the Comoros Islands’ capital, Moroni, when it plunged into the sea today, Taha al-Ashwal, a Yemenia official, said by telephone from Yemen’s capital, Sana’a. The airline said the crash took place during stormy weather.

The passengers, most of them Comorians, began their journey from Paris to Sana’a on a Yemenia Airbus A330 that had a stopover in Marseille. They were transferred to the A310 for the final leg of the flight from Sana’a to the Comoros. The 19-year- old A310 that crashed had been barred from use in France after a 2007 French inspection, the government in Paris said.

The crash is the second involving an Airbus in a month. An Air France Airbus A330-200 en route to Paris from Rio de Janeiro went down in the Atlantic on June 1, killing all 228 people on board.

Blacklist Proposed

EU authorities, who maintain a list of banned carriers, will assess the safety level of Yemenia and also propose a worldwide blacklist for some airlines, EU Transport Commissioner Antonio Tajani said. The next update of the EU blacklist is due in 10 to 15 days.

“To reinforce security around the world, we have to have a global blacklist,” Tajani told reporters in Brussels today, adding that the Airbus that left France was a “good aircraft.”

Yemen’s national carrier said the plane that came down in the waters off southeastern Africa with 142 passengers and 11 crew members on board was safe to fly.

“We never had problems with the plane. It was purely weather,” Abdulkalek Saleh al-Kadi, chairman of majority state- owned Yemenia, said in a telephone interview from Sana’a.

The aircraft, leased from International Lease Finance Corp., was last serviced on May 2, al-Kadi said.

“It was not banned at all,” he said of the French action following the inspection. “We always do standard maintenance and scheduled maintenance. It was a regular inspection based on the maintenance schedule in line with what the manufacturer tells us. We follow the manual, we follow the book.”

First Incident

The captain of the Yemenia airliner was middle-aged and experienced, with “thousands of hours of flights,” the airline chairman said. Al-Kadi said the incident is the first for the airline, founded in 1961 as Yemen Airways Co.

Winds were gusting as high as 113 kilometers (70 miles) per hour and the sea was rough, Agence France-Presse reported, citing senior Yemeni aviation official Mohammad Abdel Kader. Officials lost contact with the aircraft at about 1 a.m. local time, said Yemenia’s al-Ashwal.

Wreckage was spotted off the coast of the archipelago. One young girl survived the crash, while five bodies have been located, the Yemeni Civil Aviation Authority said in an e-mailed statement released by the Yemeni Embassy in Washington. The girl, admitted to a hospital in Moroni, is 14, AFP said.

Most of the passengers were of Comorian origin from France, the airline said. Sixty-six French nationals were on the flight, the French Foreign Ministry said. About 200,000 Comorians live in France, according to the French government.

Nation Dependent

“The Comoros are a poor and small country that can’t afford to have its own airline, so it’s dependent on whatever airlines fly in the Indian Ocean,” Stephane Salors, the country’s consul general in Marseille, where a large Comorian community lives, said on France’s i-tele channel.

“There have been many complaints over the years about Yemenia,” he said, adding that the A310 was an “old-generation plane” that had other accidents in the past.

French Transport Minister Dominique Bussereau said that the inspection of the crashed A310 in 2007 noted “a certain number of faults,” without elaborating on the problems. The plane was banned from France, and Yemenia since that time had been “under strict surveillance,” he said in an interview with i-tele.

Bussereau later told the parliament in Paris that rules are needed to ensure that an airline whose fleet includes planes banned from flying in Europe isn’t allowed to transfer passengers from a European flight to a banned aircraft.

Problems Fixed

Yemenia’s deputy managing director, Ali Sumairi, said the French findings were “minor” and had been corrected. “The aircraft was technically sound,” he said in an interview with France 24 television. ‘1The airplane departed without any technical problems.’’

French President Nicolas Sarkozy dispatched airplanes and ships from Reunion Island to help with the search. In a statement today, he expressed his profound shock and assigned Transport Minister Bussereau to monitor the situation.

France today sent a military plane with a medical team and deep sea divers aboard. Tomorrow, a naval patrol boat and a helicopter carrier will be on the scene, the Defense Ministry said.

Yemenia sent a team to the Comoros Islands to investigate the crash, said the company’s chairman. The BEA, the French Aviation Accidents Bureau, said in a statement that it’s sending investigators accompanied by Airbus specialists to Moroni.

Crashes Not Linked

The French minister ruled out any link between the crashes of Yemenia’s A310 and Air France’s A330.

“It would be as if there were two accidents with Clios and we withdrew all Clios from the road,” Bussereau said in remarks televised from Charles de Gaulle airport outside Paris, referring to the model from carmaker Renault SA.

Yemenia runs four A310-300 that are leased, according to the Arab Air Carriers Organization. The oldest plane was built in 1990 and the newest in 1997. The airline, which is 51 percent owned by Yemen’s government and 49 percent owned by Saudi Arabian Airlines, also operates leased Airbus A330-200 and Boeing 737-800 aircraft.

Airbus SAS said the aircraft in the Yemenia crash was an A310-300 that left its production line in 1990. The plane had been operated by Yemenia since 1999, the planemaker, based in Toulouse, France, said in an e-mailed statement.

Yemen is the poorest Arab nation, with about 40 percent of the population living on less than $2 a day, according to the U.K. Department for International Development.

The Comoros Islands are divided into an independent nation, the Union of the Comoros, and the island of Mayotte, a French territory claimed by the Union of the Comoros.

To contact the reporters on this story: Massoud A. Derhally in Amman, Jordan, at mderhally@bloomberg.net; Henry Meyer in Dubai at hmeyer4@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: June 30, 2009 15:45 EDT