A spate of plane disasters -- from deadly crashes in Greece and Venezuela to the landing accident that all passengers survived in Canada -- has revived questions about international airline safety and inspections.
But for passengers who want to get informed before they climb aboard, it can be difficult to judge a carrier by its accident record, aviation experts say.
France wants to address the problem by giving the safest carriers a government seal of approval that could be used in advertising, while the EU is pushing for a blacklist of those who cut corners.
All 152 passengers and eight crew members aboard a Colombian-registered West Caribbean charter died Tuesday when the plane went down in Venezuela -- the latest of four serious airliner crashes this month that have cost a total of 297 lives.
Two days earlier, 121 people died when a Cyprus-registered Helios Airways Boeing 737-300 plunged into the mountains north of Athens after an apparent loss of cabin pressure. Another 16 were believed to have perished Aug. 6 when a plane operated by Tunisia's Tuninter crashed off Sicily.
August's aviation death toll would have been higher still were it not for the miraculous escape on Aug. 2 of all 309 people aboard an Air France Airbus A340 that overshot the main runway in Toronto and burst into flames.
Because air accidents are still so rare -- despite this month's spike -- airline records fail to tell the whole story, safety specialists say.
The passengers on the plane that crashed in Venezuela were on their way home to the French Caribbean island of Martinique after a week vacationing in Panama.
French President Jacques Chirac's government has yet to announce a policy response to the Venezuela accident -- one of France's worst ever air crashes. But the disaster is expected to give added urgency to plans to award "blue labels" to safer carriers starting early next year.
The proposals were introduced after the country's last major air disaster, when a Flash Airlines charter crashed into Egypt's Red Sea on Jan. 3 last year, killing all 148 on board -- mostly French tourists. After the Egypt crash, it emerged that Swiss aviation authorities had banned Flash from the country, without passing on their safety concerns to other nations.
France has said it supports European moves to create a blacklist of unsafe airlines.
The US has a slightly different system that focuses on countries rather than airlines, and uses aviation safety standards set by the International Civil Aviation Organization, a UN agency headquartered in Montreal. Twenty-six of the 100 countries that have been assessed do not meet ICAO standards, most in Africa, South America and the Caribbean.
Introduced by EU Transport Commissioner Jacques Barrot, a Frenchman, the European proposals are still working their way through lawmaking institutions. The process could be sped up in the wake of this month's accidents, of which three out of four involved little-known charter companies.
The EU Commission on Wednesday acknowledged a need to improve "the area of safety supervision."
Few carriers have spotless safety records and by the time serious blots appear, it often is too late, experts say.
"What the French are proposing is just another tier of bureaucracy," said Chris Yates, an aviation safety analyst with Jane's Information Group.
The French measures, to be financed by the industry, could increase the cost of flying without enhancing safety, Yates said, adding his prediction that many consumers will put cheap fares before safety anyway.
"The traveling public is very price conscious," he said. "Many of us say, `It's the cheapest of the lot -- I'll go with it and take my chances.'"
Inspections cannot always be relied upon to pick up potential problems. West Caribbean's ill-fated McDonnell Douglas MD-82 had been checked twice by French authorities in Martinique in recent months, according to Dominique Perben, France's transport minister, who said "no particular observations" were recorded.
Venezuelan investigators have said the pilots had radioed to report the failure of both engines shortly before the plane came down.
Searchable databases of accidents, from full-blown crashes to minor runway scrapes, are available at a handful of respected industry Web sites like the Aviation Safety Network.
In addition, thousands of safety incidents -- for example when two planes fly or taxi closer together than national or international rules allow, without actually colliding -- are reported each month to national aviation authorities. Even specialists find it hard to analyze all of their safety implications, said David Learmount, Flight International magazine's safety editor.
If the Helios passengers had checked out the carrier on available accident databases before boarding the plane, "all they would have found out is that [the airline] had never had an accident before," Learmount said.
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