I am not expert on legal matters, but for those - unfortunately many - contributors who seem to have no clue at all, some observations.
It was observed at a meeting of the RAeS Law Group earlier this year, reported in Flight International, on the criminalisation of aviation accidents, that the French legal system does not have the mechanism of the English legal system, the inquest, to determine what went on in an accident. So in France, for the state to determine what indeed went on, there must be a criminal trial. First point: it's a shame for all that they don't have inquests. I am sure many French people agree.
Second: why do you need an inquest? Amongst other things (and "gaining closure", being a US import and to me unwelcome, is not one of them), it is to help figure out who should ultimately pay. For there is am ancient general principle of compensating victims of mishaps and this should not only follow rules but also be seen to be "fair", adjudicating amongst competing claims.
Third: this isn't a "bonanza for tort lawyers". The airline (that is, the airline's insurance company) has already paid to settle most or all tort claims, as is by now the rule in commercial aviation. The cost is reported to be in the realm of €100 million, relatively low for such accidents (Concorde did not carry so many passengers).
Fourth: the ruling is Continental 70%, EADS 30%, everyone else (Air France, DGAC, Paris Airports Authority, etc) 0%. That means that the insurance company will be negotiating with those parties to recover the relevant proportion of its costs. Since there is now a legal ruling which will act as precedent, there is little point in disputing it in court. (I guess the discussion would be something like Continental pays €70m, EADS €30m.)
Fifth, what is this ruling based on?
The ruling is based on the obvious physical ABC of the accident occurrence.
The report said: titanium strip fell off Continental onto the runway; Concorde ran over strip; strip sliced into tire and caused tire burst of unprecedented form and strength; large tire fragment hit tank; impact shock wave caused tank to explode from within; resulting hole allowed fuel to stream out in large quantity; fuel was ignited (not completely sure how, but probably by reheat); fire engulfed critical wing structure and contributed to critical performance degradation of two engines; Concorde cannot accelerate after TO on two engines alone (BTW, there is no evidence that Concorde was overweight at TO) and went down.
That's what the court found also. People have said "missing spacer". Our work on that said: not relevant. People have said "overweight at dispatch". Yes, but not at TO, as far as anyone can tell. People have said "airport should have swept runway better". Yes, but that wasn't a direct contributing cause in the intuitive sense of the above sequence of physical events. It would be like blaming the police for Fred's broken jaw in a street fight because they weren't there at the time. Thousands of years of legal tradition says the person responsible for the broken jaw is the person who threw the punch. So here: the court said that the entity responsible for the burst tire is the entity that left the titanium strip on the runway; and, further, as I understand it, the person who mounted that titanium instead of an aluminium part; as well as, to some degree, the people responsible for the aircraft design, even though (and others here will agree with me here) the airplane was a triumph of aeronautical technology. Other people (Continental) said the plane was on fire before it encountered the strip. The report, as well as all of the people I know who know about Concorde, indeed, physical common sense given the undisputed evidence of what happened, have no explanation at all of how that could possibly have been the case. The only evidence is circumstantial - eye witness testimony from witnesses who were far away from the scene. There is no physical explanation of the accident which coheres with that testimony at all, after ten years of thinking about it. So, reasonably, that testimony was (I take it) rejected.
Now, that all seems to me, given the system, appropriate, fair, and straightforward. What is not appropriate, in the minds of many including myself, is that it seems to need a criminal trial, rather than an inquest, to serve this necessary legal function of apportioning the enormous costs of compensation.
PBL