Originally Posted by B Fraser
(Post 10037151)
It was a multitude of failures to follow SOPs. I post here under my own name so please forgive me for calling a spade a spade but the elephant in the room here would appear to be operating culture.
with regards to aircraft maintenance.....reading between the lines in the report, that undercarriage was reassembled incorrectly on a night shift (not the first or last time a serious maintenance error happened in the middle of the night). However you have to ask.......if the aircraft was at MTOW (not over it), took off with the spacer in place the No 2 engine wasn't shut down.....would the outcome have been different? (btw the tank that ruptured wasn't overfilled according to the report) Well the tyre would almost certainly still have burst. If it shed 4.5kg of rubber up against the tank it would still have ruptured and caught fire. If engine 2 hadn't been shut down it would have flamed out anyway as engine 1 did. So they may have flown a little bit further but the outcome would have been the same. |
The chap who gave the presentation I attended mentioned that some of the runway lighting debris was ingested by the #1 engine. I'm not sure how he knew this but as he was a BA skipper, I trust his account. Perhaps if the spacer had been fitted and the strip of titanium was positioned so it still hit the tyre, would the aircraft have veered by the same degree and not hit the edge lighting ? We will never know.
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Originally Posted by booke23
(Post 10037440)
However you have to ask.......if the aircraft was at MTOW (not over it), took off with the spacer in place the No 2 engine wasn't shut down.....would the outcome have been different? (btw the tank that ruptured wasn't overfilled according to the report) Well the tyre would almost certainly still have burst. If it shed 4.5kg of rubber up against the tank it would still have ruptured and caught fire. If engine 2 hadn't been shut down it would have flamed out anyway as engine 1 did. So they may have flown a little bit further but the outcome would have been the same. All this discussion about the crash must not detract from the stunningly brilliant technical achievement that was Concorde. |
You are quite right about the tyre debris.......To cause tank rupture it probably had to hit the tank within quite a small range of angles......a more glancing blow would not have had the energy to cause major damage. It could have flown off the tyre at any angle, yet it happened to impact the wing square on and rupture it.
If you tried to replicate it in a lab, you'd probably have to do it a couple of dozen times before you got a piece to hit the wing and cause damage. Of course these type of freak happenings are often the root of many disasters.
Originally Posted by Buster15
(Post 10037608)
All this discussion about the crash must not detract from the stunningly brilliant technical achievement that was Concorde.
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Originally Posted by Buster15
(Post 10037608)
They were also quite unlucky in that the tyre debris was thrown up at speed and impacted the underside of the wing very close to a junction between a thicker and thinner (machined) section. The fuel pressure pulse then fractured the skin at that junction.
I think it is well documented that the tank did not rupture at that point. The absence of an air gap in the tank due to intentional overfilling caused conditions where a shock wave could pass through the fuel, blowing out a hole far from the point of debris impact. Another violation of a SOP, another hole in the Swiss cheese. |
Quite so, The rupture of the tank was FROM THE INSIDE OUT, not the outside in, by an overpressure caused by there being insufficient gap of compressible air at the top of the tank to absorb that overpressure in the incomprehensible fuel, the initial cause of which was a big bit of tyre hitting (but not puncturing) the underside of the tank.
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It's also worth pointing out that according to John Hutchinson fuel was being transferred forward from the rear fuselage tank during the take off roll, this is apparently not permitted. The reason was that the CoG was too far aft, not helped by that extra baggage. In addition because rearwards transfer is needed for acceleration with centre of lift movement it was important to get the fuel out of the fuselage tank for that reason too otherwise there would be no space to move fuel back once climbing towards Mach 1.
Something not often mentioned is that the longer CDG-JFK route imposed a fuel penalty on Air France Concordes and perhaps that could have led to a culture of adding extra fuel which became a habit and was not questioned. |
Originally Posted by booke23
(Post 9949296)
The aircraft was also overweight by 0.7 - 1.2 tonnes, which it pretty shocking practice from a national carrier IMHO.
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Originally Posted by flyboyike
(Post 10039195)
You're kidding, right?
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Those bags are said to have been loaded in the rear hold which didn't help the CoG. A further 10 bags were left behind. The status of each bag is not immediately clear however the accepted number of bags loaded that were not on the load sheet is 19.
The document at the link below shows that right rudder was being applied progressively during the take off run. The key data is about 1/3 down the page showing larger lateral accelerations from 100kts onwards. This could be consistent with the hypothesis that the missing spacer was affecting performance prior to the tyre burst event and reliable witness statements that smoke was seen far earlier than the fire. I can't see any reference to the spacer in the report but I have not read it in great detail https://www.bea.aero/docspa/2000/f-s...sc000725pa.htm |
Originally Posted by B Fraser
(Post 10039972)
The document at the link below shows that right rudder was being applied progressively during the take off run. The key data is about 1/3 down the page showing larger lateral accelerations from 100kts onwards. This could be consistent with the hypothesis that the missing spacer was affecting performance prior to the tyre burst event and reliable witness statements that smoke was seen far earlier than the fire. I can't see any reference to the spacer in the report but I have not read it in great detail https://www.bea.aero/docspa/2000/f-s...sc000725pa.htm |
Thanks Buster, I was looking for references using keywords but can't find any in the preliminary report. The subject is as you say covered in the final report from P.148 onwards at https://www.bea.aero/uploads/tx_elyd...-sc000725a.pdf
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Is the chronic lateral and increasing port side trend charged to a specific finding?
It seems to me that if FOD is portrayed as the cause, its location on the runway has much to do with this left drift. Absent leftward Bias, does the Titanium strip come into play? At all? |
Knowing how - ahem - 'unbiased' the French are when it comes to attributing blame (like their despicable attempt to blame the entire tragedy on a maintenance engineer at Continental, which the courts rightly threw out) I prefer BA Concorde Captain Hutchinson's take on the spacer issue and the evidence of unbiased witnesses to which the report gives little heed, above the complete dismissal the BEA report gives it.
That is simply not tenable IMO. |
I prefer BA Concorde Captain Hutchinson's take on the spacer issue and the evidence of unbiased witnesses to which the report gives little heed, above the complete dismissal the BEA report gives it. |
The same goes for the airport fireman who noted smoke coming from somewhere consistent with the bogie.
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Originally Posted by pulse1
(Post 10042401)
Apparently he witnessed that there were signs of fire before the Concorde reached the metal strip.
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Originally Posted by booke23
(Post 10042800)
This thread is in danger of descending into a farce of conspiracy theories. (if it hasn't already).
Quite how anybody watching the takeoff could accurately know and remember where the strip was on the runway when the aircraft was travelling at speed is open to question. |
Originally Posted by Buster15
(Post 10042874)
Agreed. Some people seem to believe that because the crash investigation was carried out by the French BEA that the report was biased in favour of AF and ignored vital information.
You only have to look at how that Concorde was being operated to understand the serious inadequacies of that airline. And of course they almost lost another Concorde shortly after it was restored to service when the FE mis-handled a fuel leak and the aeroplane narrowly avoided dead sticking into the North Atlantic when if landed on fumes at its nearest landfall, Halifax Nova Scotia. No wonder they stopped operating it shortly afterwards, and shortly after that French politicking ended the BA operation as well. They were never going to allow the worlds only supersonic airliner, an Anglo-French aeroplane, to be operated by the British alone. |
Originally Posted by pulse1
(Post 10042401)
According to the series of lectures given by the ex BA Concorde flight engineer, one of the best witnesses was the captain of Mitterrand's Airbus which was holding to cross the runway. Apparently he witnessed that there were signs of fire before the Concorde reached the metal strip. His testimony was not included.
Secondly from their position they could obviously not see what caused the tire to shred. All there was too see was a dangerously off track burning Concorde passing uncomfortably close |
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