A 14-year-old girl was pulled alive from the Indian Ocean yesterday, the sole survivor among 153 people on board an airliner that crashed in high winds as it came in to land in the Comoros Islands.

The teenager was rescued off Grand Comoros as boats searched rough seas. “She is talking and she is OK,” Sergeant Said Abdela, a militiaman in the rescue boat, said.

The girl was being treated in hospital. Abdurahim Said Bakar, the Communications Minister, said that she was from a mountain village in the archipelago. A Comoran community group in France identified her as Bakari Baya, from Marseilles.

The Yemenia Air A310 that went down yesterday had been banned from France on safety grounds. It was the second Airbus in a month to crash, but there was no apparent link to the disappearance in the Atlantic of Air France Flight 447 on June 1.

The Yemenia A310, which was 19 years old, had flown from Sanaa for the final leg of a flight from Paris to Moroni. A more modern Airbus 330 had been used for the earlier legs, which had included a stop at Marseilles. At least 66 of the 142 passengers were French — mainly from Marseilles, home to 80,000 people from the formerly French archipelago.

Dominique Bussereau, the French Transport Minister, told Parliament in Paris yesterday that the aircraft had been been banned from France since 2007 after an inspection revealed multiple safety breaches. “The question we are asking is whether you can collect people in a normal way on French territory and then put them in a plane that does not ensure their security.”

Mr Bussereau said he understood that the crew had aborted the landing because of strong winds and had tried to circle to make another approach.

A Moroni airport police officer said: “The plane was about 150ft in the air approaching the runway, but instead of landing on it, it swerved away on an abnormal path back towards the sea.”

Pilots familiar with the coastal airport, which is prone to turbulence generated by mountains, said that the aircraft appeared to have been destabilised by a cross-wind or downdraught. Flying in pitch dark, it then failed to execute a difficult “go-round” manoeuvre low over the sea.

As counsellors comforted relatives in Paris and Marseilles, police struggled to contain angry Comorans who attacked the record of an airline that is on an official French watchlist after safety breaches. “We were expecting this crash to happen,” said a spokesman for the France-Comores association in France. “There have been times when people have turned up at the airports and seen the conditions of the planes and refused to get on.”

A group called SOS Voyage aux Comores, set up last year to campaign for safer flights on the route, demanded action from France. Farid Soilihi, a spokesman for the group, said: “The accident was predictable. These are planes that do not meet international standards.”

Yemenia was the cheapest of all the companies with a near-monopoly on this destination, he added.

Stéphane Salord, the Comoros Consul in Marseilles, said: “The Comorans save up for months to go to Comoros with their families. In this plane there were entire families, parents, children, elders who were with them. There is a lot of anger and emotion.”

Yemenia is not on a European blacklist of dangerous airlines, though it had been summoned to a meeting in Brussels next month to account for safety breaches. The last two aircraft lost by Yemenia were Boeings, both without loss of life.

The A310 is a long-range version of the original Airbus, which was introduced in the 1970s. It does not have the electronic “fly-by-wire” controls of the later Airbus family and eight have crashed in the past three decades, killing 673 people.

Explore World News

• World Agenda

• Iraq News

• US & Americas News

• Europe News

• Middle East News

• Afghanistan News

• Asia News

• Africa News

• Ireland News

Times Recommends

• 'New York has lost its edge'
• Copenhagen will fail – and quite right too
• More than 17,000 new underwater species found