A group of 25 Finnish tourists were on a flight operated by the Egyptian carrier Flash Airlines on December 25, just over a week before one of the airline's planes crashed in the Red Sea near the resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.

   

The flight on Christmas Day was for a day trip from Sharm el-Sheikh to Cairo. The Finnish tour operator Top Matkat uses flights by local operators for day trips on tours in Egypt. It is not known if the plane used on the domestic flight was the Boeing 737 which crashed last Saturday, killing 148 people - mostly French tourists.

   

Finnish aviation authorities have ascertained that the stricken plane had been allowed to fly charter flights to and from Finland last year. However, Reijo Lamberg, deputy head of Finland's Civil Aviation Administration (CAA) said on Monday that the permit to fly to Finland is no longer valid.

   

In October Finnish holidaymakers flew on the plane from Cairo to the Finnish city of Joensuu, from where it went on to Kokkola to take another planeload of Finns to Cairo. The permit would have allowed the airline to take another group of tourists from Jyväskylä to Sharm el-Sheikh on Monday this week, but another Egyptian carrier, Luxor Air, was used for the flight.

   

Top Matkat, which specialises in holiday travel to Egypt, normally uses Luxor Air to fly Finnish tourists to Egypt, and the use of Flash Airlines was a temporary arrangement. For day trips within Egypt, Top Matkat is now using two other local carriers, Egypt Air, and AMC.

Questions have been raised in the aftermath of Saturday's crash about why Flash Airlines was granted permission to fly to Finland last year even though the CAA had been informed that Switzerland had banned the airline from its airspace because of safety concerns.

   

Lamberg says that in September 2003 nobody in Finland apparently made a connection between the licence application of Flash Airlines and the information that came from Switzerland the previous year.

   

The Finnish News Agency STT reported on Monday that the CAA had received a message from a pan-European authority on problems with the airline, but that the e-mail was lost in a mass of messages.

Lamberg dug up the information on the results of the Swiss inspections on Monday, but he would not say exactly what kinds of problems were involved. "Reporting that information is a matter for the Swiss authorities."

   

Foreign planes stopping in Finland are subject to random inspections. Lamberg says that inspectors of Finland's Flight Safety Authority conduct 10 to 30 such "ramp inspections" each year. If serious shortcomings are found with a plane it is grounded until the problems are rectified.

Luxor Air can expect to face inspections in Finland. According to the web site of the small charter company, the airline has one Boeing 707 and one MD-83.

   

The Flight Safety Authority has about ten inspectors.