EU airline blacklist does even less for air safety than expected

I've argued before that blacklists do little to help aviation safety, and the publication today of the European Union's long awaited list of banned and restricted carriers has done nothing to change my view. Here's the list in full.

The news is that any of you who were considering flying to or from Europe on the airlines of Equatorial Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone or Swaziland will now find that impossible. It's also going to be even harder to put yourself in the tender hands of North Korea's state airline, and you can tear up your frequent flyer cards on a handful of carriers from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Rwanda, and the Comores. There's more detail, but you get the idea.

The EU says this will make a substantial contribution to air safety in Europe, but I can't for the life of me see how. A miniscule contribution perhaps - anyway, I hope nobody spent too much time producing the list. I rather fear they did, but maybe they just looked up the US FAA's IASA list which would have largedly saved them the trouble.

Perhaps most significantly for the people of Europe, the methodology that appears to have been employed would not have prevented any of the accidents that resulted in all the political furore that culminated in the publication of the list.