July 1 (Bloomberg) -- The teenage French girl who survived the crash of a Yemenia Airbus could barely swim and held on to a piece of debris, her father said.

Kassim Bakari told i-tele news station that he’s spoken to his daughter Baya from a hospital in the Comoros. None of the other 152 people on board, including Baya’s mother, have been found alive, even though it appears some survived the initial impact with the Indian Ocean.

“She said ‘Papa, the plane fell into the water and I could hear people talking around me,’” Bakari said from the Paris suburbs. “‘It was dark I couldn’t see anything.’ She’s not a good swimmer but she held on to something. She doesn’t know what it was, evidently part of the plane.”

After initially being told that her mother was in another room at the hospital, she’s now been told that her mother is probably dead, Bakari said. Agence France-Presse originally reported the girl’s age as 14, and now says she is 13 years old.

The Airbus SAS A310 en route from Yemen’s capital Sana’a crashed just before arrival at Moroni, the capital of the Comoros Islands.

Sixty-six French nationals were on the flight, most of them, like the Bakaris, of Comorian descent.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy will attend a ceremony tomorrow at a Paris mosque to honor the victims.

Two French navy ships are arriving in the zone today to join the search for wreckage and bodies. A French patrol plane from the Indian Ocean island of Reunion has picked up a signal from the plane’s emergency beacon, the first step towards locating the crash site and recovering the flight recorders, Christope Prazuck, a spokesman for the French military said in a telephone interview.

Bad Weather

“The weather was bad, and the plane was not in good shape,” Alain Joyandet, France’s under-secretary for development aid, said in a telephone interview with i-tele from Moroni. “That’s what we know.”

The passengers began their journey in Paris on an Airbus A330 and were transferred onto the A310 in Sana’a for the final leg to the Comoros Islands off the southeastern coast of Africa.

The A310 is no longer in production. French safety inspectors found faults with the 19-year-old aircraft that crashed yesterday in 2007 and it “had been excluded” from flying in France, French Transportation Minister Dominique Bussereau told parliament yesterday.

“It’s an international problem, how can we ensure that passengers being transported on a perfectly acceptable plane aren’t later transferred to a plane that doesn’t meet safety standards?” Joyandet said today.

Yemenia Chairman

Yemenia Chairman Abdulkalek Saleh Al-Kadi said stormy weather was to blame for the crash. He denied the plane, last serviced on May 2, was banned from flying in France.

The pilot was “well experienced, middle aged and has thousands of hours of flights,” the chairman said.

Comorians and French of Comorian descent protested at the check-in counter of today’s Yemenia flight from Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport to Sana’a, demanding that Yemenia use A330s on the Sana’a-Moroni leg as well. The plane took off a half hour late.

The Comoros Islands are northwest of Madagascar. There are no direct flights from France, even though about 200,000 Comorians live in France, according to the French government. The country is “poor and small” and cannot afford its own carrier, Stephane Salors, the nation’s consul general in Marseille, said yesterday.

The Comoros Islands are divided into an independent nation, the Union of the Comoros, and the island of Mayotte, a territory that voted to stay linked to France in 1974 and 1976 referendums. It’s claimed by the Union of the Comoros.

Editors: Peter Torday, John Deane

To contact the reporters on this story: Gregory Viscusi in Paris at gviscusi@bloomberg.net; Henry Meyer in Dubai at hmeyer4@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: July 1, 2009 07:41 EDT