To try and get back on track; Five people including Continental Airlines employees are in a French court, on trial over the Air France Concorde crash in July 2000. The debate within this forum has geerally been whether the BEA report into this tragedy (which is thole whole basis of this court case) was objective and fair in the first place. This debate is mainly centred around the BEA dismissal of critical evidence by highly credible eye witness reports and discounting out of hand the omission of a critical component by Air France maintenence personell. The whole blame for the crash is placed on a titanium strip on the runway, which had fallen from a Continental DC10, causing a tyre blowout and subsequent jettisoning of a large section of wing lower fuel tank surface. The resulting massive fuel stream flowing out of the fuel tank ignited and caused a massive fire, which resulted in the eventual crash of the aircraft, with the loss of 113 souls.
The point being made here (and this is NOT just my opinion; as I said before this is the opinion of a very large number of highly respected and learned people, not just in the UK, but elsewhere too:
- The aircraft was highly over weight, taking off with a tailwind. The CG was way beyond the ABSOLUTE maximum for T/O of 54%, reduci9ng the effectiveness of nose wheel steering. (Particularly during the initial phase of the T/O roll).
- An ommited spacer on the front L/H bogie had resulted in massive distortion in the geometry of the front wheels on this U/C. (Borne out by large amounts of R/H rudder application from the early to the very last satages of the T/O roll, with very little or no heading change. The trauma on the U/C was mitigated by rolling over an initial very rough runway surface, awaiting repair.
- Eye witnesses (including 2 French airport firefighters, the closest of all to the A/C) categorilcaly stated that they saw smoke and flames eminating from the L/H U/C long before 'the titanium strip'.
- The hydro-dynamics of the rupturing of the wing panel were like nothing ever experienced before, adding to the theory that this never was a simple tyre blowout,. There is an additional theory, not accepted by all that fuel tank #5 was being pressurised due to an illegal switch position. As tank 5 was directly feeding the ruptured #2 tank, the additional pressure of head plus pump pressure contributed to the hydo-dynamics of the event. This additional point however is not pivotal.
- The A/C never achieved safe flying speed, on a day when the V2 was 220KTS, takeoff was at 201 knots, the maximum achieved IAS was 211 KTS. When the A/C was only running on 3 full thrust producing engines (#1 being seriously damaged by a runway light) #2 engine was shut down by the F/E strictly against SOPs. It was impossible for the A/C to remain flying after this.