Thank you, everyone, for returning this thread to interesting
discourse. I was despairing of the increasing number of willfully ignorant declamations and am glad it has turned again towards discussing criminalisation.
Concerning wings folded's suggestion about Aviation Week, although it is published in the US it is not clear that its majority readership resides there. It is one of the two major industry publications, and has recently "poached" some senior people from the other. It has excellent journalists based all over the world. Pierre Sparaco has written a number of columns in recent years on the criminalisation of aircraft accidents. It is one of his big themes; he deplores it. Pierre is of course French, and writes from France. He could very well have written, or been involved in writing, that editorial (I could ask him, if anyone really wants to know). His carefully-presented views are always worth considering carefully, even if one doesn't accept all of them. I have kept copies of all his essays on criminalisation from 2006.
I particularly appreciate Iron Duck's essay on the post-WW-II polity and kappa's reply! Interesting thoughts, well put together, and, when one thinks about it, very relevant to the circumstances in which Concorde was conceived. I already noted the contrast to the B-58 Hustler, with the incident in 1961 (that came straight from the 2001 revised edition of Kenneth Owen's book, published by the Science Museum).
Concorde was a very high-performance airplane. I think the previous time that a civil transport was higher-performance than military aircraft was in the times of the Beech Staggerwing. (That may seem ancient, but keep in mind there was less time between Staggerwing and Concorde than between Concorde and A380!). It was a very high-performance airplane with, as M2Dude pointed out, characteristics necessary for its high performance which posed risks different from those being mitigated and solved in the rest of aviation. Most notably, issues with high-speed landing gear. But there were also issues with the rudder.
It was also produced in very limited quantities for what turned out to be a very limited market (but also a very profitable one for BA, which is why mike-wsm's comments are just so off-the-wall). When you have a one-off design point, and relatively low accumulation of operational hours, it is going to be correspondingly difficult to cope with emergent risks (and there are always - always - emergent risks).
And there lies the most astonishing phenomenon with the aircraft, to my mind. That aircraft flew twenty-four years of commercial service without endangering the lives of anyone on board or on the ground.
Compare with the nearly-contemporary Boeing 727, one of the most successful passenger transports of all time, and loved by many pilots. Seven fatal accidents in the first five years of service introduction, killing a total of 368 people (if my arithmetic is correct - from Aviation Safety Network's database at
Aviation Safety Network > ASN Aviation Safety Database > Type index > ASN Aviation Safety Database results).
Then compare with the contemporary Boeing 737, which went five years in-service without a fatal accident, but then had three within about a year (
Aviation Safety Network > ASN Aviation Safety Database > Type index > ASN Aviation Safety Database results).
The Boeing 747 also went five years in-service before a fatal accident. Then there were four fatal accidents in the next four years, killing a total of 813 people (
Aviation Safety Network > ASN Aviation Safety Database > Type index > ASN Aviation Safety Database results).
That was the level of safety achievable and achieved at the time with what was to become the conventional transport design.
And Concorde went
24 years in-service without endangering anyone! Despite being a completely different design point.
(BTW, for those really interested in that design point, there is a superb article on-line, which unfortunately costs nearly $42 to download, A Review of the Technical Development of Concorde, by C.S.Leyman, Progress in Aerospace Sciences 23(3):185-238, 1986. URL for the on-line version is
here (and is rather long).)
To my mind, that record set not only a different performance-design point, but set a different point in design and operations for safety.
Compare following aircraft. The Airbus A300 was in service for 16 years with only nine fatalities (in 1988 one from Iran Air was shot down by the USS Vincennes; I am not counting that incident) until PIA in Kathmandu (1992). The A310, five fatal accidents in the first ten years of service. The A320, also five fatal in the first ten years in service.
Yes, one could compare fatalities per seat-mile or fatalities per operational hour or per flight or other measures, but it is always going to be difficult comparing statistically a low-volume-production low-op-hours singular-design-point with high-volume-production high-op-hours conventional-design-point. Let me just return to the point that for a commercial aircraft to go 24 years in service without endangering anyone on board is unparalleled and, to me, nothing short of spectacular.
And the lessons from that experience have, most obviously, been learned and reapplied in the design and operation of subsequent Airbus aircraft, whose benign aerodynamics was conceived by the same people who designed Concorde. The Concorde was at the cusp of a step change in commercial aviation safety.
This makes it particularly ironic that people are being tried, and some convicted, in 2010 for a freak accident that ended the most spectacular safety record in commercial aviation.
PBL