I can hardly believe what I've read here. These columns are filled with moans, groans, flamings and fumings about the media getting things wrong, especially when they speculate, and then you guys go and dance on the graves of the Concorde crew -- in probably the grossest display of insensitivity I have ever seen on this forum -- because of a half-baked theory. Captain Hutchinson IS in love with Concorde. On Panorama he called it "the aircraft I love".
And while we are in mote-and-beam mode, let us not forget that Hutchinson was a junior officer on the BOAC 707 which lost an engine over Heathrow in 1968, and returned, landing successfully. I recall hearing him on Radio 5 on the day of the Concorde crash saying that losing one engine was not necessarily any big deal, because it had happened to him. Hmmm. What actually happened was that the flight crew (of which Hutchinson probably the most junior member, true) failed to shut off the fuel to the burning engine, which then fell off. Five men in the cockpit and not one thought to pull the fire-handle on the affected engine. Even after landing fuel was pouring into the hole on the wing, turning a manageable crisis into an inferno and costing five lives. Read the AAIB report if you don't believe me. Panorama glossed over this embarrassing incident by saying the BOAC pilots "saved 121 lives" without mentioning the five dead or 38 seriously injured. Nor did they find the space to say the flight crew was criticised in the AAIB report.
On the day after the Concorde crash Hutchinson was quoted in the press saying, "It is, in my view the safest aeroplane that is flying in the skies today." Even if you don't see this statement as faintly ridiculous, how could he possibly know this on the very day of the crash? I think he was following his heart, not his head, and has been doing so ever since.
All that stuff about being over MTOW, changing wind speeds, the spacer, etc. is pure speculation. The BEA proved their independence by slagging off various parts of AF management and maintenance in the final report. When the magistrate gets going he will indict various people in AF and probably charge a few of them.
The French are not above a bit of patriotism-induced blindness, but if BEA thought the crew had done the wrong thing they would have said so. The chauvinists in this case are the ostriches who insist this could only have happened to a French Concorde. Concorde tyres -- British and French -- have blown up and made holes in fuel tanks on six or seven other occasions. The difference was that this time, the leak ignited. It could have happened to anyone.
The crash made the French fall out of love with Concorde and start to look on it as just another aircraft. It is high time the British did the same.