The European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) has banned 83 airlines from five African countries from flying to Europe because of their weak control and oversight capacity, a local report said on Wednesday.

Local SABC news reported that the airlines in Swaziland, Sierra Leone, Equatorial Guinea, Liberia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo would be blacklisted from Friday.

Another nine companies in Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, Thailand, and Rwanda were banned for serious shortcomings in safety regulations.

Although not many of the banned airlines flew to European destinations, the ban was imposed to prevent them from being subcontracted and slipping through the net.

The blacklist would be updated every three months and companies could be removed from it if they met EASA standards, according to the report.

Source: Xinhua