EU expected to reveal banned airlines

BRUSSELS, Jan. 27 (UPI) -- The European Union is expected to approve in Brussels a EU-wide blacklist of unsafe airlines after the crash of the Flash Airlines plane that killed 148.

It was only revealed after the Flash Airlines crashed on Jan. 3 that Switzerland had banned the airline from its airports, the BBC reported Tuesday.

The French tourists flying with the company were unaware that the airline whad been banned on safety grounds in 2002.

"The Flash accident will mean huge progress in the field of air safety as the Prestige (sunken oil tanker) did in the field of marine safety," said MEP Nelly Maes, the European Parliament's rapporteur on the safety of foreign planes.

"It's very sad to see that the council (European ministers) and the commission were only prepared to act when those disasters forced them to act," he said.