Wallabie, encore une fois
I, like all others, feel deeply for the loss of the individuals concerned in this tragedy, but as pilots we are required to look at cold, hard facts and deal with them dispassionately. We have to ask awkward, searching questions of all those involved in any incident. That is how we will avoid such accidents in the future, and how we as professional aviators will learn and improve our skills.
The mechanism of breach of the fuel tank was hydrolastic shock caused by the fact that the aircraft had been over-fuelled. This resulted in the wings being inflated and so compromising their structural integrity. The capacity of the aircraft in question is stated in the BEA report as 94470kg. The engineer read out the fuel on board as 96400kg which is 1930kg more than the certificated maximum fuel load and 2437 litres of extra volume to fit inside the wings.
Such procedures are not in use by other operators of Concorde, and therefore the incident at Washington is unlikely to have resulted in the same outcome. As it happens, as a result of that incident, modifications were undertaken to all Concordes on that operator’s fleet to prevent a reoccurrence. Evidently the Concorde at Gonesse did not have these modifications fitted. In the rare cases where extra fuel is needed, then other operators load special high specific gravity kerosene.
If I were a fellow countryman aviator of yours, I would be deeply offended by your assertion that any pilot would deliberately ignore the certificated maximum parameters of their aircraft. Je suspecte, Monsieur, que vous parlez de vous-même.