Tourists tape up dodgy plane

2005-08-31 09:50

Berlin - German tourists found themselves using adhesive tape to stick together the interior of a plane operated by a Turkish airline with a troubled safety record, a German newspaper said on Tuesday.

The midair repair job came during an Onur Air flight from Antalya in southern Turkey to the eastern German city of Leipzig, the Bild newspaper said.

"The pilot started the engines. Suddenly a piece of the interior of the plane fell on our heads. Some of the holidaymakers started to scream," one of the passengers, Gunnar Storch, 34, told Bild newspaper.

"A female flight attendant immediately ran into the cockpit to ask for the takeoff to be aborted. But the pilot wasn't in the least bit interested. He just carried on.

"Behind the interior casing, we could see the exposed wiring. It wasn't a very reassuring sight."

Exposed wiring

Bild published passengers' photographs of the exposed wiring inside the Airbus A321.

Storch, who was returning from a holiday with his wife and two children, said he used tape he had in his hand luggage to attempt to stick the panel back into place as the plane reached an altitude of 33 000 feet (10 000m).

The plane later landed safely in Leipzig but Storch said "no one was interested" when he tried to report the incident at the airport.

Bild did not say when the flight took place, and there was no immediate reaction to the report from either the Turkish airline or Airbus.

Onur Air was briefly banned from Dutch skies in May for security reasons, with France, Switzerland and Germany following suit.

The four countries decided on a progressive lifting of the ban after the airline put forward a programme of safety improvements.

Beset

Another Turkish airline, Fly Air, has been beset by safety concerns in recent weeks. One of its planes was seized by the French civil aviation authority at the weekend.

France and Belgium on Monday published a list of airlines banned from their airspace in the wake of a string of fatal accidents this summer, including a crash on August 16 that killed 160 people in Venezuela, almost all of them French tourists from the Caribbean island of Martinique.

The French authorities said they had banned five passenger carriers, and Belgium nine cargo companies, but neither Onur Air nor Fly Air were among them.

- SAPA