"If the boffins rule out an explosion, Quantas/Boeing will be doing a lot of heartsearching about grounding the rest of their fleet. At least it’s not the crown skin".
The problem is enchrisg we are talking BOEING. The 737-200's were not grounded even after THREE hardover rudder crashes.
No one has an explanation for the BA 038 crash, yet hundreds of B777's still fly with yet more power down incidents.
A Concorde runs over a bit of metal off of a DC10 and the fleet is grounded, even though it has been flying for over 25 years with no previous loss of life and tyre vulnerability to debris a known Achilles Heel.
Make your own mind up.
Commercial aviation achieves an accident rate of better than 1 in a million departures. Concorde had an accident within about 50,000 departures across the fleet. From what I understand, there was evidence of similar similar incidents that were "near misses". The probability is that concorde was significantly more dangerous than other models in operation.
I believe there are about 700 777s in operation. They must rack up more departures in one year than concorde did in its entire service. They have been in production for 20 years. Incidents like the BA crash are demonstrably rare and it is not unreasonable that the risk is seen as acceptable for them while that for concorde was not. The same went for 737 rudder hardovers and 747 failures.