French Concorde crash

[Lemurian]

jcjeant,
It's not in my habit to search the garbage bins. It's unhealthy.
If it's conspiracy theories your cup of tea, there are plenty on the www.
On the other hand, simple manners would have made you responding to direct questions on your posts.

SLFin AZ
Had you had the decency to read the previous posts, you'd have found all your doubts answered, by some people of some stature in the accident investigation world. When PBL talks of an unprecedented event, I think he knows the value of each word.
And no, the so-called *pressure ram effect* by a violent shock on a tank wall without puncture was not foreseen by anyone. As a matter of fact, the AAIB representative is still not convinced, he still thinks of apuncture.
As if in the US they have always seen everything and taken into account avery scenario God could have imagined. Pretty arrogant sort of attitude,I think, knowing the shuttle destruction...among others.
Secondly, and that is in fact the gist of your posts, why do you separate the brits from the French on this : as far as I know, before the accident, both fleets had the same standards, except the retreading interdiction that has been inforce much earlier than in France (which did not solve the problem in totality as I remember...)
Sorry, French bashing could be dangerous to the Brits, sometimes.

[Lemurian]

DozyWannabe :
From which we can gather, presuming the information is correct, that the photograph may have been taken from an airliner, but not the AF 747 that was clearing 26L.
The conclusion from ID is in my opinion very correct.
As it happens, there seem to be two different aircraft : one at the S1 holding point, the other still on V1, having just exited 26L.

[DozyWannabe]

Given how busy CDG tends to be, I'd say there were probably a few more on the taxiways!

Also, there was one more modification to the bogey that BA implemented and AF didn't - hard to say if it would have made a difference in this case though.

[jcjeant]

Hi,

When PBL talks of an unprecedented event, I think he knows the value of each word.Sure he know.

And the main argument based on the character supposedly unique and unpredictable process of tearing the tank as implemented in the accident of July 25, 2000 does not, since November 15, 1985 in London, the Following the bursting of a tire during rolling, a depression of the interior to the exterior of a fuel tank resulting from a shock on the underside of the wing had already taken place.So the only unprecedent event (when you read above) is that for the AF Concorde catastrophe the fuel tank was not only deformed but was opened and the result was a uncontained fire leading to the crash.
So (with what we have above) it was not too difficult to imagine (after 15 Nov 1985) the possibility to have someday not a simple depression but instead a rupture
Of course until it's happened ... it was a unprecedented event.
That's the value of the words.

[Lemurian]

jcjeant :


So the only unprecedent event (when you read above) is that for the AF Concorde catastrophe the fuel tank was not only deformed but was opened and the result was a uncontained fire leading to the crash.

Didn't I tell you that I'm not interersted in garbage ? Secondly, when you undertstand the physics phenomenon involved in the fuel leak, then you can talk to me. Until then, you're just making smelly puffs of air.
Lastly, everyone on this thread has had the civility to post in an understanble English. Either you understand French and can translate it or you don't.
I suspect you don't.
So stick to the technical report. It explains in great detail why it was an unprecedented event, never considered in the civil aviation field.

[SeenItAll]

Wings Folded: A number of months ago in a different forum on this board, you explained that although the French prosecutors had not levied any charges in this matter against Air France or Aeroports de Paris, no one should be worried that that these entities would escape judicial scrutiny. You stated that unlike U.S. courts in which the judges are powerless to examine the potential contributing guilt or innocence of parties not before the court, the Pontoise judges could be expected to pose questions to these parties so as to assure themselves that they were without any culpability for this tragic event.

I have not had the opportunity to read the transcript of the trial or its decision. Can you inform us if the judges conducted this inquiry as you suggested they would? Or did it occur that their inquiry was limited strictly to the entities that the prosecutors had decided to put in the dock?

[jcjeant]

Hi,

never considered in the civil aviation fieldWhat you write is very important and certainly the words never considered
With all the feedback of the accidents story about tires and fuel tanks of the Concorde it was possible to consider a possible future catastrophe
As we see .. the future can not be only based on graphics .. curves and results of computations and statistics
Crystal ball is also not needed nor a "précis de grammaire" ... just some good sens and imagination are needed
Of course if you never consider or never imagine ...

[infrequentflyer789]

Since AF would be presumed to have a higher standard of obligation the mere fact that the Concorde was on the runway is grounds for negligent homicide since any reasonable and prudent person would logically conclude that the planes history of damage specific to tire failure called for safety measures.


Seems you missed the extensive research done following those previous failures, and the resulting ADs. Risks were assessed following F-BVFC, changes were made. Following tyre-burst incidents were, I believe, less severe (in terms of wing / tank damage). Sounds prudent to me.

The very fact that the plane did have a history of tyre bursts gives more data points to work with as to the risk and level of damage, and for some reason F-BTSC is a massively improbable outlier.


The source of the tire damage is incidental to the fact that the plane had a history of potentially catastrophic failure in the event of a tire blowout at high speed prior to takeoff.
Au contraire, the source of tyre damage may be critical to the outcome. It looks like no one had considered previously the possibility of a tyre not bursting as such (overheating, wear, underinflation, puncture) but being sliced apart through its entire thickness. It appears that this mode of destruction liberated much larger peices of tyre at higher energy.

If you don't accept that, then how do you explain how this incident caused tank penetration / fuel leak over ten times worse than the previous worst case (after which modifications had been made) ?


The simple reality is that the Concorde should not have been flying until basic safety issues specific to percussive failure of the fuel tanks were solved.
What projectile impact tests are done for assessing hydrodynamic ram vulnerability in certification now on civilian aircraft ? What testing has been done on hydrodynamic ram vulnerability on existing already certified civilian types ? What ADs issued on it for existing types ? Or were all other existing types miraculously not vulnerable to it ?

Oh, and are the stronger tyres designed for Concorde now on all civilian types ? That would be prudent, would it not, given what we now know about tyre failure from being sliced by fod ? The stronger tyre design is a solved problem, an extant solution for a known risk, surely we should ground any aircraft that doesn't use it ?

[deSitter]

Very interesting thread. But let's end it - I'll admit to fault - I dreamed of supersonic travel as a kid and look what happened.

-drl

[ChristiaanJ]

Of course if you never consider or never imagine ...As happened with a cargo door parting company with a DC-10....
Nobody 'considered' or 'imagined', until a closely similar event brought down the Turkish Airlines DC-10 near Paris.

CJ

[Iron Duck]

Very interesting thread.

It is, but now seems to be in a 3-way stalemate between:

1. those who appear to believe that the crash happened because Concorde was actually on the runway and shouldn't have been because it was not airworthy;

2. those who adhere to the evidence in the report, which states that the aircraft was airworthy and would have enjoyed an uneventful flight had it not rolled over the titanium strip; and

3. Continental's lawyers, who appear to have thought that they wouldn't get away with using argument 1, and therefore used an "it wasn't me, mister" argument based on an alleged fire existing before Concorde hit the strip, rendering the strip incidental to the accident.

Do I read that right? Where do we go from here, then?

I dreamed of supersonic travel as a kid and look what happened.

The world's most beautiful aircraft. :ok:

[Nick Thomas]

KBPsen
I used your quote to make a point. Am sorry if by doing so you feel agrieved.

I also said at the end of my penultimate paragraph in post 245 that "The last sentence is not directed at you KBPsen" so am sorry that you feel that my comments were directed at you.

Regards
Nick

[lomapaseo]

Iron Duck

It is, but now seems to be in a 3-way stalemate between:

1. those who appear to believe that the crash happened because Concorde was actually on the runway and shouldn't have been because it was not airworthy;

2. those who adhere to the evidence in the report, which states that the aircraft was airworthy and would have enjoyed an uneventful flight had it not rolled over the titanium strip; and

3. Continental's lawyers, who appear to have thought that they wouldn't get away with using argument 1, and therefore used an "it wasn't me, mister" argument based on an alleged fire existing before Concorde hit the strip, rendering the strip incidental to the accident.



I'm not so sure about the allegations of an argument as put forth in (3)
above unless it was somehow precised somewhere in this thread

and of course you omitted my suggestion as:

2a. Those who posit the argument that the aircraft was airworthy and would have safely landed after a tyre failure had it not been for the unlikely combinations of damage following a designed for tyre failure

[Old Fella]

Iron Duck, I guess many of those on the accident flight had dreamed of supersonic flight, and look what happened to them. I think the loss of the opportunity by deSitter is somewhat less than their loss of life.

[jcjeant]

Hi,

Lemurian
Secondly, when you understand the physics phenomenon involved in the fuel leak, then you can talk to me. Until then, you're just making smelly puffs of air.It's really a pity that the time has researchs were conduct to minimize the risks caused by leaking fuel tanks you was not part of the experts party.
Apparently because the experts at the time don't understand the physics phenomenom involved in fuel leaks they were unable to predict the coming catastrophe .. and so they called it a unprecedented event.
Or .. they knowed all about .. but cause design they were unable to correct the problem unless drastic modifications and involving a big amount of money ?

[PacWest]

Mr. Thomas, may I quote you?

I also said at the end of my penultimate paragraph in post 245 that "The last sentence is not directed at you KBPsen" so am sorry that you feel that my comments were directed at you.


In reference to 'your last sentence' ... you were referring to the many admonitions to posters re their racist comments you have made throughout this thread ....

Then, Mr. Thomas may I comment that I had no idea the French (France) were a ~race~ , more particularly since les Quebecois are considered to be pur laine and would most certainly be offended to be referred to as a ~race~.

To date, in my opinion, there has been nothing more than various references to the pros and cons of the peoples of certain countries and as such obviously a comment may be offensive or - defensive.

by the way Mr. Thomas, there is only one 's' in occasion!

[solaise]

What projectile impact tests are done for assessing hydrodynamic ram vulnerability in certification now on civilian aircraft ? What testing has been done on hydrodynamic ram vulnerability on existing already certified civilian types ? What ADs issued on it for existing types ? Or were all other existing types miraculously not vulnerable to it ?

Oh, and are the stronger tyres designed for Concorde now on all civilian types ? That would be prudent, would it not, given what we now know about tyre failure from being sliced by fod ? The stronger tyre design is a solved problem, an extant solution for a known risk, surely we should ground any aircraft that doesn't use it ?Reading the BEA report I wondered the same thing. As far as I can tell Concorde was doing approximately 170-180knots when it hit the titanium strip? Is there no danger at all if an Airbus A380 tyre was destroyed in an identical manner near its rotation speed? I know that the wing is thicker and the tyre pressure less - is that sufficient?

After the crash Concorde was modified with kevlar fuel tank liners, burst resistant tyres, and the electric wiring in the wheel bay protected against tyre damage.

[Iron Duck]

lomapaseo

I'm not so sure about the allegations of an argument as put forth in (3)
above unless it was somehow precised somewhere in this thread

There have been complaints that eyewitnesses who claimed to have seen fire prior to the tyre burst were ignored. We've looked at the BEA report and established that

1. the timeline reveals that the crew received no fire warnings or indication of engine failure until after rotation had commenced (which rather rules out pilot error);

2. the engines reveal no physical evidence of having been on fire.

I've asked what else might have been on fire prior to the tyre burst apart from the engines, and why, and why no physical evidence for it has been found, but no-one has answered. Silence is Golden.

We've also looked at the pictures apparently shot from an aircraft on one of the South taxiways, established that the viewing angle is so acute that accurate estimates from occupants of aircraft in that area of what happened where on the runway are unlikely, and because of that and their distance from Concorde, that their verbal testimony was unlikely to add much beyond what can be gleaned from the photographs themselves, which all show that there was no fire on the RH side of the aircraft, contradicting the claims of the firemen.

[In the process of examining the photos and timeline we've also established that there was an aircraft somewhere on S1, that after the tyre burst but before rotation Concorde started to swing to the left, that only Concorde's crew could see exactly what was in front of them, and that on this basis the early rotation was justified to avoid a runway excursion to the left and possible collision with the aircraft on S1.]

I havent read the trial transcript (can't read French) but from news reports and the comments posted here I've gained the impression that Continental's lawyers didn't directly challenge Concorde's airworthiness, but went to great lengths to try to establish a preexisting fire that mitigated the influence of the titanium strip, and therefore the culpability and liability of their client. Please correct me if I have this wrong.

So all in all, Continental's argument appears to me to have been examined and found wanting.

and of course you omitted my suggestion as:

2a. Those who posit the argument that the aircraft was airworthy and would have safely landed after a tyre failure had it not been for the unlikely combinations of damage following a designed for tyre failure

I think it is a subset of 2, as you state. Concorde landed or stopped safely after every other tyre burst.

Old Fella

I guess many of those on the accident flight had dreamed of supersonic flight, and look what happened to them. I think the loss of the opportunity by deSitter is somewhat less than their loss of life.

Not to diminish your statement I think that similar can be said for anyone who ever got onto an aeroplane, but never got off again. But I agree with you.

Edit: I should add that on page 92 of the BEA report, the text accompanying the photographs includes a general summary of eyewitness statements.

[wilyflier]

Isnt it likely that the witness statements of "fire before point of tyreburst" ( particularly one of "fire on the right wing") actually referred to their sighting of the normal afterburner lightup during takeoff ?

[ToddD]

Just another case about how there is no control over the plane crash investigations. The airline was half owned by the government, the airplane is half french and the crash is investigated by the french without any control from abroad.
There is a good example how useless the European Aviation Safety Agency is when it comes to plane crash investigations. An airplane crash in Estonia in 2001 of an also half government owned airline and an 8 year trial that is still not finished. No one is really hiding anything so it is a good example that the whole investigation goes out the window once government interests are involved...

In that investigation the officials openly admit that at they messed up the Black box data but they say there is no need to for a correct Black box data (even though the investigation is based on that data). The investigation is done by the people who's interest directly conflict with the investigation and that is actually against the EU rules for the aviation accidents investigations. And they managed to stick in some black box data from a crash in Venezuela into the investigation. The investigation was just just organized to pass the blame. But not only did they get away with all that. A criminal case was started based on that investigation.
So my point is if the french wanted to hide anything, there was nothing stopping them. The Estonian precedent shows that you can mess up aaannnything during the investigation there is no control by EASA, ICAO or anyone else. Of course the French are a lot more professional, so if they had something to hide, we will never find out what it was.

If you want to read more about the Estonian crash.
Hiiumaa An-28 Plane crash investigation blog:
Esnov's Blog English (http://esnov2.wordpress.com/)

[ChristiaanJ]

Isnt it likely that the witness statements of "fire before point of tyreburst" ( particularly one of "fire on the right wing") actually referred to their sighting of the normal afterburner lightup during takeoff ?I read the original report again a couple of days ago, and yes, I think you're right. The word 'allumage' does not usually mean 'catching fire', but 'being lit', or 'lighting up', being the common term for when the afterburners light up.

What doesn't help, of course, that we only have a brief summary of each statement, not the full text, and that several statements were added or amended in 2003, three years after the accident.
Between recall of a three-year old event, summary and translation, it's easy for the original meaning to get lost.

CJ

[wings folded]

SeenItAll,

Wings Folded: A number of months ago in a different forum on this board, you explained that although the French prosecutors had not levied any charges in this matter against Air France or Aeroports de Paris, no one should be worried that that these entities would escape judicial scrutiny. You stated that unlike U.S. courts in which the judges are powerless to examine the potential contributing guilt or innocence of parties not before the court, the Pontoise judges could be expected to pose questions to these parties so as to assure themselves that they were without any culpability for this tragic event.

I have not had the opportunity to read the transcript of the trial or its decision. Can you inform us if the judges conducted this inquiry as you suggested they would? Or did it occur that their inquiry was limited strictly to the entities that the prosecutors had decided to put in the dock?


Twas indeed several months ago (February?) and I recall your reasoned posting.

I have kept abreast of the hearing while it was taking place, and have of course read the judgement.

I am afraid that I just do not have the time to assemble all those instances in the trial when the court required explanations outside of what the "trial bundle" (not a term with any relevance under French procedure, but a convenient shorthand. I would want to be verbose!), but there were many instances of just such a thing.

What several posters who dislike this judgement appear to overlook completely is that Continental did not hire a lawyer fresh out of law school on a work placement course.

They hired one of the top flight lawyers in France who has recently acted for a former Prime Minister, and for an inheratrix of France's largest personal fortunes.

Acting for Continental, he was able to call for his own witnesses if their version of events worked in favour of his client.

A lawyer with his experience and skill must have made reasoned choices about the strategy. If he chose not to call evidence from parties other than those accused, he did so knowingly.

The trial as is normal under French procedure heard from lawyers acting for the "parties civiles", who were also dismissive of the Continental version. They had no particular chauvinistic agenda.

And the judgement is not "let the French off and blame the Americans".

The mechanic's supervisor was exhonerated. EADS and a French national were found to have a degree of reponsibilty.

Sorry if my reply is abit long, but I wanted to answer your question.

[Nick Thomas]

PacWest
Thank you for your comments. I am quilty of using the term racist as shorthand for discrimination based on race.

The United Nations Convention on the Elemination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination states:

"the term "racial discrimination" shall mean any distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, colour, descent,or national or ethnic origin which has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life"

I hope that clarfies my position.

Regards
Nick

[SeenItAll]

WF: Thank you for your explanation. I must admit I was puzzled that Continental's defense case seemed so focused on trying to establish that the fire has started before the tire burst. To me, it would have seemed more logical that it should have focused on the contributory negligence of AF and Aeroports de Paris. But maybe its goal was to hit a "home run" (i.e., be found completely non-culpable) rather than simply to establish that they were but one of several aligning holes in the swiss cheese.

[Iron Duck]

SeenItAll

I must admit I was puzzled that Continental's defense case seemed so focused on trying to establish that the fire has started before the tire burst. To me, it would have seemed more logical that it should have focused on the contributory negligence of AF and Aeroports de Paris. But maybe its goal was to hit a "home run" (i.e., be found completely non-culpable) rather than simply to establish that they were but one of several aligning holes in the swiss cheese.

Continental's lawyers appear to have concentrated on getting their client off the hook, as is their job. The court, concentrating on establishing the truth as is its job, found Continental's argument inconclusive and therefore dismissed it.

That looks like a decent decision to me.

As I said earlier, Continental didn't directly attack Concorde's airworthiness, which would have required attacking AF, BEA, Aeroports de Paris, etc., probably because their seasoned lead lawyer reckoned they stood less chance of success with that approach than the one they took.

[bearfoil]

Is "Insufficiency of Counsel" an allowed Plead on Appeal in France??

[wings folded]

SeenItAll,

I think that a factor easily overlooked by people whose national pride was outraged by this verdict, is that no entity has ever disputed that the "wear strip" was made of one of the most resistant materials available. Perhaps not too wise a decision.

Conitinental and their legal team faced a bit of a struggle against that particular fact.

We are not party to their deliberations, but perhaps they would think it wise not to dwell too much on the dodgy piece of repair work, whose consequencies were as it transpired, catastophic, but could equally have been totally benign had Concorde tracked a couple of feet right or left on its roll, and missed the debris.

[wings folded]

Mr bearfoil.

You cannot be serious.

Continental employed one of the most senior and respected avocats in France.

[bearfoil]

How well was she tracking? Who could possibly defend the CAL "mechanic"? I meant no disrespect for this verdict at all, on the contrary, it seems to have satisfied at least one contingent, and as I say, the Titanium blunder is indefensible. I do not even rue amateur "partisanship", it is the stuff of discussion. What irks me is the level to which some would take their devotion. A product of Human interaction is not a basic of the Laws of Physics. Eh?

Courts produce Opinions. Enforceable Opinions. They have Power, which is seductive to many people, but should not encourage "fans". Courts are only one step above "Elections". IMO.

Observer only, and I know my place.

bearfoil

[lomapaseo]

Iron Duck

I havent read the trial transcript (can't read French) but from news reports and the comments posted here I've gained the impression that Continental's lawyers didn't directly challenge Concorde's airworthiness, but went to great lengths to try to establish a preexisting fire that mitigated the influence of the titanium strip, and therefore the culpability and liability of their client. Please correct me if I have this wrong.

So all in all, Continental's argument appears to me to have been examined and found wanting.



I have no idea if you have this right or wrong and that is why I questioned its validity.

I am aware of that argument and of course just the fact that the argument persists would be logically pointed out by any lawyer for examination and weighting.. Of more interest and assignment to a party defense would have been their evidence that their expert's facts supported the argument.

The unanswered question itself would have mitigated assignment of blame.

[wings folded]

Courts produce Opinions.


They produce verdicts.

[bearfoil]

Verily. Ver. Vere. Truthfully.

A verdict? An Opinion, carrying the force of Law. (Judgment)

"Statement of Truth"? "A conclusion; an opinion, or judgment."

[wings folded]

Iron Duck


As I said earlier, Continental didn't directly attack Concorde's airworthiness, which would have required attacking AF, BEA, Aeroports de Paris, etc., probably because their seasoned lead lawyer reckoned they stood less chance of success with that approach than the one they took


I see generally what you mean , but in what way could the BEA and ADP be held in any way responsible for Concorde's airworthiness?

The owner/operator perhaps.
The builder perhaps.

But holding the agency responsible to investigate accidents on their turf as being implicated seems a little far fetched.

Some believe that ADP were slack in not inspecting the runway after each TO.

Imagine screeching condemnations of delays at CDG if a runway inspection took place between each TO.

[ChristiaanJ]

... attacking AF, BEA, Aeroports de Paris, etc.
... the agency responsible to investigate accidents ... Slight confusion here, I think.

The BEA is the "Bureau d'Enquêtes et d'Analyses", which is the French equivalent of the British AAIB or American NTSB. They investigate, analyse and report, and come up with a "probable cause".

What you are thinking of is the DGAC, the Direction Générale d'Aviation Civile", which is the French equivalent of the British CAA and the American FAA. They are the ones that deal with rule-making, airworthiness, safety, etc.

And one of the five people in the "box" (Claude Frantzen) was indeed an official from the DGAC.

CJ

[Nick Thomas]

Bear
I have sent you a PM re your post no282
Regards
Nick

[wings folded]

Christaanj,

If there is confusion, then it is in your head, not mine.

I know full well what BEA stands for.

Idem DGAC.

When I refer to to: "But holding the agency responsible to investigate accidents on their turf as being implicated seems a little far fetched. ", I would have thought that a well informed chap such as you would know I meant the BEA. No confusion on my behalf with the DGAC.

I am familiar enough with both the DGAC and the BEA not to confuse the two.

[wings folded]

Bear
I have sent you a PM re your post no281
Regards
Nick

Nick, most kind but on my version, post 281 was actually one of mine.

[Nick Thomas]

Sorry typo error I meant post 282

Regards
Nick

[Iron Duck]

Bearfoil

How well was she tracking?

Reasonably well, according to the BEA report. As I said here (http://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/435870-french-concorde-crash-10.html#post6110154), pages 147-154 deal thoroughly with the left main bogie, and conclude:

"Overall, the balance of forces at the centre of the bogie would result in self-aligning moment and two loads whose resultant is increased drag, that is to say a tendency to make the aircraft yaw to the left. The level of this drag would be at most around 1000 daN, very low in relation to the thrust of the engines. The influence of possible sideslip on the trajectory is thus very low or negligible."

Wings Folded

I see generally what you mean , but in what way could the BEA and ADP be held in any way responsible for Concorde's airworthiness?

There was an assertion earlier in the thread (http://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/435870-french-concorde-crash-13.html#post6112985) that DGAC/BEA were culpable because in the opinion of the poster they allowed an un-airworthy aircraft to continue to operate. There was also an assertion that ADP were culpable because they didn't sweep the runway before Concorde's takeoff.

It strikes me that if you are going to argue that the crash occurred because Concorde happened to be on the runway in the first place you're going to have to question its airworthiness, which means questioning the authorities in the country that issued its C of A.

Similarly, if you're going to argue that the crash wouldn't have occurred if the strip wasn't on the runway, and you're defending the airline whose aircraft dropped it there, you're going to have to argue that ADP failed in its duties by not sweeping the runway.

I can quite understand why CAL's lawyer didn't fancy either of these approaches.

[wings folded]

Wings Folded


Quote:
I see generally what you mean , but in what way could the BEA and ADP be held in any way responsible for Concorde's airworthiness?
There was an assertion earlier in the thread (http://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/435870-french-concorde-crash-13.html#post6112985) that DGAC/BEA were culpable because in the opinion of the poster they allowed an un-airworthy aircraft to continue to operate. There was also an assertion that ADP were culpable because they didn't sweep the runway before Concorde's takeoff.




Since when and in what jurisdictions did a post accident investigitave agency have powers to ground a type? They can make strong representations to the FAA, CAA, DGAC or whomsoever, but have no actual powers.

And you take all assertions in this thread as being gospel?

[ChristiaanJ]

ChristaanJ,
If there is confusion, then it is in your head, not mine.
I know full well what BEA stands for.
Idem DGAC.Sorry, wings folded, I should have used the quotes differently.
Iron Duck mentioned BEA somewhat out of context, and I tried to clarify the matter...

CJ

[wings folded]

No lasting grudge, CJ.

I am a little bit aware of this case since I worked on it, and I get annoyed by people who know not of what they speak.

[Iron Duck]

And you take all assertions in this thread as being gospel?

No. On the contrary. That's why I used the word "assertion". Going back to my categorisation of the 3-way stalemate I think only argument 2 has any real validity: the argument based on the factual contents and conclusions of the BEA report.

ChristiaanJ

Sorry, wings folded, I should have used the quotes differently.
Iron Duck mentioned BEA somewhat out of context, and I tried to clarify the matter...

Indeed I did, based on the contents of this assertion (http://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/435870-french-concorde-crash-13.html#post6112985). Sorry for the confusion.

I wouldn't be surprised if France's airworthiness authorities have institutional problems. Show me a large organisation that doesn't. However, that approach strikes me as stony ground if you're trying to get your client off the hook, which is why I'm not surprised CAL's lawyers didn't go for it.

[wings folded]

Wings Folded

Quote:
And you take all assertions in this thread as being gospel?
No. On the contrary. That's why I used the word "assertion". Going back to my categorisation of the 3-way stalemate I think only argument 2 has any real validity: the argument based on the factual contents and conclusions of the BEA report.

ChristiaanJ

Quote:
Sorry, wings folded, I should have used the quotes differently.
Iron Duck mentioned BEA somewhat out of context, and I tried to clarify the matter...
Indeed I did, based on the contents of this assertion (http://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/435870-french-concorde-crash-13.html#post6112985). Sorry for the confusion.

I wouldn't be surprised if France's airworthiness authorities have institutional problems. Show me a large organisation that doesn't. However, that approach strikes me as stony ground if you're trying to get your client off the hook, which is why I'm not surprised CAL's lawyers didn't go for it.


I am by now confused about who believes what.

I know that elements in west of 30 degrees are peeved that a degree of blame was attached to them. But it was never all one way.

A due process took place, not in haste, some would sat at a leisurely pace, and came up with a finding permised upon the law and the evidence.

Why exactly are we still debating the issue?

I am because I do not want to leave unanswered nonchalent Arizonian (for example) remarks.

[DozyWannabe]

I am a little bit aware of this case since I worked on it, and I get annoyed by people who know not of what they speak.

Worth bearing in mind that ChristiaanJ worked on Concorde as an engineer, so he probably knows the technical stuff better than almost any of us.

[wings folded]

Thank you DW, a worthy contribution of which I was not fully aware.

There are as we sadly know, further ramifications.

I have been a little bit involved in them.

[Iron Duck]

I believe:

1. That the BEA report is a factual document, that its conclusions are reasonable, and that arguments and findings based upon it are sound.

2. That in order to defend his client, CAL's lawyer had to find an alternative narrative to that expressed in the report. That was not easy. It seems to me that among his choices were to assert that Concorde was not airworthy or adequately operated and tackle the consequences of that assertion. I think he wisely chose not to pursue that.

3. Another possible line of approach might have been to have a go at ADP for not having swept the runway. I think the lawyer rightly concluded that there probably wasn't much mileage in that approach, either.

4. Having abandoned these possibilities the lawyer was left little option but to try to build a narrative around the idea that the titanium strip was incidental to the accident, rather than its primary cause, and so brought into question the provenance of the fire. Despite the effort expended to build that narrative the Court found it inconclusive and dismissed it.

5. Incidentally, and off the subject of this thread, I think it is not controversial to be unsurprised if large organisations have institutional problems of one kind or another. However, I think that such problems, if they exist, are of no material bearing in this case.

I hope I've made myself clear.

[ChristiaanJ]

In the context of this particular thread (responsability, verdicts, etc.), there's still one thing I personally keep scratching my head about....

Who blew the tyre, that caused the fuel leak?
Continental's incompetence - not arguing that at the moment.

But.... who lit the fire? In the sense of "who was responsible?".

Had the fuel leak not caught fire, we would have had a very messy repeat of Dulles 1979, but no crash.

As the BEA report states, the "most probable cause" is arcing of wiring of the 115V brake fan supply in the wheel well.
"Blow-back" from the n°2 engine surge, or "flashback" from the reheat are mentioned as other, possible but less likely, ignition sources (once the fire caught hold, it would obviously be 'sustained' by the wheel well, regardless of the original cause).

Did the tyre burst scatter enough debris to also damage the wheel well wiring, in which case we're back to the starting point... no tyre burst, no leak AND no fire?
Or was there a 'pre-existing condition', not present in any of the previous incidents?
If so, who was responsible?
Any evidence obviously got lost in the resulting fire and the crash.

Apologies to all you reading this.... just mulling it right here.
- The tyre burst and fuel leak didn't cause the crash, as such.
- The subsequent fire did.
If the two are directly linked, there's no further argument. I just wanted to throw this into the 'arena'....

The subsequent actions by Airbus included shielding the landing gear wiring, and turning off the brake fans during take-off, but those were only actions "post quem" as in blocking one of the possible 'swiss cheese holes', so they don't really tell us anything.

CJ

[bearfoil]

FWIW. A Missing spacer? Assumedly not present prior to Brakes release? At two hundred knots, given some slop in the Bogey, and perhaps (likely) some Sparks?

Bob's your Uncle? I doubt it........but then........

bearfoil

[jcjeant]

Hi,

This whole tragedy may be summarized briefly
The bursting of the tire has lost a strip by a Continental plane.
It appears for all (according to the reports and trial) as obvious.
The mechanic for Continental is primarily responsible for the outbreak of the tire.
Also known as the bursting of tires is a common thing in aviation.
If the planes are well designed .. the bursting of a tire should not end with a total loss of an aircraft.
Continental mechanic is only responsible for the outbreak of the tire .. the following is another story.

[MurphyWasRight]

Continental mechanic is only responsible for the outbreak of the tire .. the following is another story.



A friend of mine was on a jury that found a man guilty of manslaugter in a case where the victim died of injuries that normally would have been relatively minor.

The victime however had a severe bleeding disorder, unknown to the defendant.

The judge's instructions to the jury were very clear: An unexpectedly fragile victim is not a defense when you do something you know is wrong.

Obviously US and French law are not the same but I believe the general principle would apply in most countries.

[Iron Duck]

ChristiaanJ

But.... who lit the fire? In the sense of "who was responsible?".

[snip]

Did the tyre burst scatter enough debris to also damage the wheel well wiring, in which case we're back to the starting point... no tyre burst, no leak AND no fire?

An excellent question. I think QF32 makes a useful parallel.

A rotor burst occurs. The extent of the potential debris field can be predicted, but not the specific trajectories of individual fragments, or their exact energies. The potential debris field encompasses vital components. In the event, a fragment damages wiring such that an otherwise undamaged and expensive engine (No. 1) cannot be shut down and has to be drowned, trashing it.

In the same way, the potential debris field from a Concorde tyre burst can be predicted and encompasses the wheel well, which includes wiring looms. In the event it appears likely that a tyre fragment damaged wiring, causing arcing that ignited spilling fuel.

Who pays for loss of engine No. 1? RR? - the rotor burst in No. 2 started the chain of events - or Airbus? - their wiring was found to be vulnerable, and was directly responsible for the economic loss of No. 1.

It will be interesting to find out.

QF32's rotor burst caused a major fuel leak. What if arcing wiring had ignited that?

[bearfoil]

Procuring Cause, Duty of Care, and Holy Cheese.

Wiring is not expected to be protected from High Energy Debris: Airbus Exempt

Engine #1 damaged in the course of Emergency services protecting lives, See above, Procuring Cause. And RR will probably have to pay for the Fire Retardant used to damage its engine, as well.

The owners of the Engines, RR, Trent or Olympus have a chain of liability they will protect.

The Stub Pipe? A Toss up, to be divided between the manufacturer and the numpty who passed it to the line. OR, if Wear, and not a defect, LuftHansa needs to pay attention, if not damages.

The last one holding the Bag gets the "Shaft".

bear

[Turbine D]

Bearfoil & Iron Duck

In the end I would suspect all will pay a share. I say this based on a settlement resulting from the fatal AA accident at Chicago's O'Hare airport years ago. This accident involved a DC-10 where a GE engine broke away from the rear pylon attachment point went over the top of the wing (engineered to do just that), but in the course of this, severed the hydraulic lines that were the main flight control lines located in the leading edge of the wing. The entire DC-10 fleet, all airlines, was grounded until some resolution and checking was completed.

The root cause was identified as AA maintenance removing and installing engines using a forklift truck instead of a special lift provided for this purpose (cost reduction/time reduction decision on their part).

In the end, AA, McDonald Douglas and GE all contributed through their liability insurers to final financial resolution.

You could look at it this way: McDonald Douglas should of had these critical hydraulic lines in the rear area of the wing like the L-1011. GE's engine went over the wing, severing the hydraulic lines and of course AA for their crude engine install/removal practices. Fair? Hard to say.

Turbine D

[ChristiaanJ]

Iron Duck,
Thanks.
And I agree QF32 does constitute a parallel.
You already pointed out the similarities.

CJ

[bearfoil]

Turbine D

An excellent analysis of that flight. Only one short step to the ultimate costs.

Those who Fly. No one lost a cent in that deal but John Q. Oh, and the "Spread". The dilution of cost throughout the Insuror's Market. Them too.

Rumour. It is said that when Captain took back the controls, his foot slipped for half a second off the Right Rudder Pedal, allowing the Heavy to lurch just beyond recovery to port. Roll, nose drop, and oblivion.

[goldfish85]

Who was responsible. I need to qualify my answer by saying that I am not a lawyer (and I have no other bad habits). Several years ago a lawyer friend told me that in common law (I hope I got this right) if anythng falls off you airplane, the operator is responsible for damages, period.

If this is true, then I think all the plaintifs have to do is prove that the part, indeen, fell of the DC-10

Any lawyers out there?


Goldfish

[Out Of Trim]

Just a Thought! Whose to say that the Titanium strip when run-over was not thrown up into the under-wing surface; thus penetrating the fuel tank. Also I believe the Flight Engineer shut down the number 2 engine even though it was still producing some thrust.

[SinglePilotCaptain]

You mean the pilots were flying illegal, and not putting the passenger's safety first..

I am shocked...shocked I tell you!

[ChristiaanJ]

Just a Thought! Whose to say that the Titanium strip when run-over was not thrown up into the under-wing surface; thus penetrating the fuel tank. Also I believe the Flight Engineer shut down the number 2 engine even though it was still producing some thrust.Read a bit more of the thread... or even the BAE report, please.
* A large rectangular piece was 'punched' out of the fuel tank by the impact of the lump of tyre (by a hydraulic shock or whatever one wants to call it). The damage from the titanium strip impacting the under-wing surface would have been totally different.
* The n° 2 engine shutdown was discussed in some of the most recent posts Whether it was still producing any thrust at that moment is debatable with 20/20 hindsight.

Please don't state your "beliefs" here, before getting your facts right.

CJ

[MountainBear]

A friend of mine was on a jury that found a man guilty of manslaugter in a case where the victim died of injuries that normally would have been relatively minor. The victime however had a severe bleeding disorder, unknown to the defendant. The judge's instructions to the jury were very clear: An unexpectedly fragile victim is not a defense when you do something you know is wrong.No, you are wrong. The situations are not comparable.

In America the standard is whether a consequence is foreseeable or not. That's what establishes liability. In the case you outline I agree with the result. When you attack someone to do harm you cannot later complain that the harm was greater than what you intended. It's foreseeable that that your damage might be greater than intended.

The proper analogy to the Concorde case is as follows. Imagine you were playing with fire works on the Fourth of July in your backyard. You toss a sparkler up in the air, the wind catches it, and blows it into the neighbors yard. It just so happens that their was a leak in the neighbors propane gas tank and the wind-driven sparkler set the gas tank alight, there is an explosion, the entire house is destroyed and the neighbor and his young kids killed.

I'd argue that blowing up your neighbors house and killing them all is not a foreseeable consequence of playing with a sparkler, absent any other modifying conditions. If you string together cause and effect long enough anyone can be put to blame for anything. The verdict against the mechanic in this case just doesn't pass the "smell test" for me.

[Chu Chu]

It seems to me that if this had gone to trial in the U.S. you'd have had experts on both sides saying entirely different things about the duty of care for an aircraft mechanic. Who knows what a jury would have ended up doing.

It's safe to say (at least it think it is) that the mechanic would not have been criminally liable in the U.S. But different countries have different laws.

[wings folded]

goldfish85,


Who was responsible. I need to qualify my answer by saying that I am not a lawyer


That is obvious:


I think all the plaintifs have to do is prove that the part, indeen, fell of the DC-10


Who exactly were the plaintiffs?

[Load Toad]

If a part fell off the Continental 'plane and was not spotted or cleared off the runway it only burst the tire? What happened after the bursting of the tire is down to the design of the aeroplane?

[Alber Ratman]

The fire...

If you think Reheat can not ignite a massive fuel leak....

Mr Aussie Ardvark will show you how it can... (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JieWuez-_t8)

[Checkerboard 13]

In the end I would suspect all will pay a share. I say this based on a settlement resulting from the fatal AA accident at Chicago's O'Hare airport years ago. This accident involved a DC-10 where a GE engine broke away from the rear pylon attachment point went over the top of the wing (engineered to do just that), but in the course of this, severed the hydraulic lines that were the main flight control lines located in the leading edge of the wing. The entire DC-10 fleet, all airlines, was grounded until some resolution and checking was completed.

The root cause was identified as AA maintenance removing and installing engines using a forklift truck instead of a special lift provided for this purpose (cost reduction/time reduction decision on their part).

In the end, AA, McDonald Douglas and GE all contributed through their liability insurers to final financial resolution.

You could look at it this way: McDonald Douglas should of had these critical hydraulic lines in the rear area of the wing like the L-1011. GE's engine went over the wing, severing the hydraulic lines and of course AA for their crude engine install/removal practices. Fair? Hard to say.

Turbine D
As critical as the the use of the fork lift (or more so) in AA's shortcut maintenance procedure was their changing out the engine/pylon as a unit, rather than separating the two. This was not recommended by McDonnell Douglas (note the correct spelling) but M-D said it lacked the authority to enforce maintenance procedures.

[Iron Duck]

If you don't mind me asking, what is your view of the financial liability for the loss of QF32 engine No. 1, and how do you think it relates (if it does) to the liability for the fire that caused Concorde to crash?

By that I mean as ChristiaanJ characterises it - that the fire caused the crash, not the tyre burst and fuel leak, which had it remained unignited might well have resulted in little more than a messier Dulles.

[Alber Ratman]

Yeah, AA proceedures caused damage to the fusible pylon pins. Bet they would have used butal force to fit them. Failure of them caused the accident. The pylon was never designed to be taken off with the engine on it.

[wings folded]

Wings Folded
If you don't mind me asking, what is your view of the financial liability for the loss of QF32 engine No. 1, and how do you think it relates (if it does) to the liability for the fire that caused Concorde to crash?

By that I mean as ChristiaanJ characterises it - that the fire caused the crash, not the tyre burst and fuel leak, which had it remained unignited might well have resulted in little more than a messier Dulles.


I do not mind you asking but I am afraid that you will be disappointed by my answer.

The QF32 incident did not result in loss of life. Even had it done so, I am not competent to express a view on which law would prevail.

Nor on what the outcome could be.

There is clearly an economic loss which will in due course be resolved by civil litigation, or quite probably arbitration.

I am not a aircraft techo, and if you read my postings, you will find, I hope that I contain my remarks to those areas where I have some knowledge.

I have recently learned that CJ has some technical knowledge of Concorde.

I have never disputed his remarks.

I have disputed remarks of some who confuse criminal and civil process, and some who believe that US practice applies in all countries.

So, before I am again accused of being verbose, my short answer is "I do not know".

But I will always tend to believe that pragmatic applicable outcomes will prevail.

[Iron Duck]

Thank you.

[lomapaseo]

Yeah, AA proceedures caused damage to the fusible pylon pins. Bet they would have used butal force to fit them. Failure of them caused the accident. The pylon was never designed to be taken off with the engine on it.


Fusible pylon pins :confused:

I think not

[SgtBundy]

If a part fell off the Continental 'plane and was not spotted or cleared off the runway it only burst the tire? What happened after the bursting of the tire is down to the design of the aeroplane?

Load Toad - the tire would not have burst if the strip was made of aluminium, as it was supposed to be, instead of titanium. The tire also burst in a way far outside its design parameters because of the slicing action of the titanium strip. The fact is the design of the plane would not have been put under such conditions if that part was made of the proper material.

[ChristiaanJ]

The fire...
If you think Reheat can not ignite a massive fuel leak....
Mr Aussie Aardvark will show you how it can... (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JieWuez-_t8)Yes, I've seen those videos... there are even better ones in daylight.
The fuel (from the fuel jettison) is of course lit behind the aircraft.

If you look at the report, you will see that the reheat is mentioned as one of the possible sources of ignition.
However, the aircraft was moving at roughly 100 m/sec, while propagation of a turbulent flame is only about 20 m/sec.
Whether the flame could still have "crept" forward along the nacelle or the fuselage until it reached the wheel well, remains an open question.
The report says, that the experts did not come to a clear conclusion, so all three theories are listed, with the electric arc as the most plausible one.

CJ

[Load Toad]

Thanks for the reply about the strip and the tire.

So - had there not been that strip, causing that damage - the rest of the domino effect, the cumulative list of failures and circumstances doesn't happen and the 'plane is safe?

[wings folded]

No, you are wrong. The situations are not comparable.

In America the standard is whether a consequence is foreseeable or not. That's what establishes liability.


Fascinating.

And all along I thought that Concorde had come down near to Paris, France, not Paris Texas. I must really read the news more carefully.

[KBPsen]

Load Toad,

The strip should have been made of stainless steel and NOT of aluminium as a lot of people ignorantly claims.

Had it been made of stainless steel, as it should, the effects on the tire would still have been the same.

[MountainBear]

Fascinating. And all along I thought that Concorde had come down near to Paris, France, not Paris Texas. I must really read the news more carefully.Interesting. Sarcasm without intelligence is not amusing, merely idiotic.

I never said that the decision in France was legally wrong. If Continental wishes to operate in France they have to play by the French rules. Some way when Air France operates in America.

However, I think it's philosophically wrong. As I said, from my perspective it doesn't pass the smell test. And you'd realize, if you were actually French rather than French-flavored troll, that to be wrong philosophically is a much greater error than being wrong legally.

[Nick Thomas]

Mountain Bear
I would be grateful if you could explain what you mean when you wrote:

a) Philosophically wrong.

b) Smell test.

Thanks
Nick

[mike-wsm]

Fusible pylon pins

Frangible perhaps?

[wings folded]

Mountain bear


And you'd realize, if you were actually French rather than French-flavored troll, that to be wrong philosophically is a much greater error than being wrong legally


How do you know what my nationality is?

What is it? You seem so sure, so go ahead and tell me what my nationality is.

Having done so,what is the relevance?

What is a French flavored troll?


What is wrong with my legal analysis of French procedure?

[PBL]

I contributed to this thread near the beginning, lost interest last week, and came back because I needed to edit a post to correct a mistake I had made. And I ended up reading it.

Let me first make a point about dealing with tire-burst events.

I have particular sympathy with the Concorde engineers, who worked, for over two decades, on tire bursts, their consequences, and prophylaxis, and who (I speak from personal knowledge) were very sensitive to all the possible things that could go wrong, and dealt with them continually, setting new standards for the state of that art as they did so. Those people are not here. Some people who are here write as if none of that had ever happened, as if no one had really thought about what can happen with tire bursts. That is just not the case.

That thought and effort went into thinking about tire bursts because, as some have said, a tire burst should not be a catastrophic event, or even a hazardous one (for the meanings of these words, I refer to the regulations).

And then came Gonesse.

Was Gonesse foreseeable?

Besides my recent commentary, at http://www.abnormaldistribution.org/2010/12/06/concorde-ten-years-on/, which repeats some points I made earlier in this forum, I have (re)addressed this question of foreseeability in http://www.abnormaldistribution.org/2010/12/09/concorde-ten-years-on-part-2/. In my opinion, as one may read, along with the reasons for it, it was a freak accident. Let me assure readers that this opinion is shared by eminent former Concorde engineers, some of whom have read my note.

PBL

[Safety Concerns]

It seems to me that we are repeating ourselves to such an extent we overlook a few basics.

We have a familiar theme here. You know the one most of you wish to ignore. Just as in the Spanair, Turkish, Korean 747, Excel, Easyjet, basic maintenance wasn't performed. On the face of it initially for different reasons however the common denominator was that all the fatal decisions were commercially based.

Continental did not maintain their aircraft as per the book. Had they had done so this would never have happened. It isn't even so much about the titanium being used, it is more about whatever drove that individual to perform a task to such a shocking level of incompetence. Where was the quality control?

If we can't get the basics right we have no hope. We are not getting the basics right because aviation is on a race to the bottom as far as standards go.

That is the real basic truth. Doing the job properly won't bring a company or an aircraft down, cutting corners will.

It is a tragedy of huge proportions that not only did people die needlessly but that an icon of technical innovation was grounded as a result.

The whole thing was avoidable just like many others. The days of the unpredictable accident are pretty much gone. Most of today's accidents have their roots firmly in the stupidity of not doing what you are supposed to do. We know what causes most accidents so why do you still cut corners?

[Alber Ratman]

Mike-wsm...

Some people do call the hollow shear pins used as fusible.. They are the fail link, like the bolts in the wheels stopping dangerous overtemps and the Hydraulic check valves stopping loss of system fluid.. They are Fuses/fusible and other engineers use that term for them..

[PBL]

.. the hollow shear pins used as fusible.... are Fuses/fusible and other engineers use that term for them..

Oh, for goodness sake! "Fusible" means capable of being fused or melted by heating. People using that term for engine-pylon attachment bolts are misusing it.

PBL

[Mr Optimistic]

Why is this thread called the French Concorde crash: was there another non-French one I missed ?

[Alber Ratman]

Yeah, you are right on the Oxford term..:O Tell Boeing that about Hydraulic Fuses.. They don't melt!:E

[forget]

Oh, for goodness sake! "Fusible" means capable of being fused or melted by heating. People using that term for engine-pylon attachment bolts are misusing it.

Boeing disagrees. Fuse pins. .................

FAA accelerates 747 fuse-pin inspections-23/07/1997-Flight International (http://www.flightglobal.com/articles/1997/07/23/10728/faa-accelerates-747-fuse-pin-inspections.html)

[PBL]

Oh, for goodness sake, doubled!

I did a search on ADs on the EASA site for "fuse pin" and there are four US ADs on engine/pylon "fuse pins" for Boeing aircraft.

I didn't say anything about the term "fuse pin". A fuse pin isn't fusible.

There is no mention in the AD, nor in the article which forget referenced, for any use of the term "fusible" other than what I mentioned.

This is a good example of why I don't read such threads for a week, even those about topics which interest me greatly.

PBL

[oldchina]

We know that Boeing uses "fuse pins". We know that Airbus doesn't use them.

As this started as a discussion of a DC-10, does anyone know whether McDo did?

[Alber Ratman]

I aplogise for using the wrong term PBL.. Shear pin is a more apt IMHO..

[lomapaseo]

DC10 hollow fuse pins :confused:

What about the cracks in the bulkhead?

I agree with PBL 99% of people misunderstand the term "fuse pins"

Once a boeing designed "fuse pin" got inadvertently installed on a DC9 powered by the same model engine "bad move"

[Iron Duck]

PBL

These are excellent pieces of writing:

http://www.abnormaldistribution.org/...-ten-years-on/

http://www.abnormaldistribution.org/...ars-on-part-2/

I think we can all agree that lacking an inquest system as it does, that in France it is necessary to hold a criminal trial to apportion the costs of compensation is deplorable.

Your first piece effectively reaffirms the BEA report and the findings and verdict based upon it. I think the "cross-examination" in your second piece rather comprehensively plants a stake through the heart of the "Concorde wasn't airworthy because it was susceptible to severe damage from a relatively common occurrence" argument. That only leaves the CAL allegation of a pre-existing fire. In several posts I have asked, given that the engines show no physical signs of fire damage, what the nature of the alleged fire might have been and what might have caused it.

There have been two answers: here (http://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/435870-french-concorde-crash-6.html#post6107845), FAStoat said that there might have been an afterburner fire. Apart from whether such a fire could have been caused by an improperly fitted fuel pump (I don't know - I'm not an engineer), this raises the questions of whether such a fire would have left any physical evidence behind, and whether the existence of such a fire would have been causally necessary, given that it seems ordinary afterburner might well have been able to ignite the fuel spill unaided.

Bearfoil reckons here (http://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/435870-french-concorde-crash-16.html#post6114670) that sparks from the misaligned bogie could have been an ignition source. It seems to me that that would require spilling fuel to be able to travel almost vertically down from the hole in the fuel tank to the bogie several metres below, against a 200Kph airspeed. Is such a thing likely?

Does anyone else fancy having a pop at the pre-existing fire theory, before we allow Concorde to rest in peace?

This has been a very interesting and informative thread. I've learned quite a bit here. Thank you all, for that.

[bearfoil]

iron duck

JetBlue had a nosewheel event at LAX where the wheel was ninety degrees to the Heading on landing, It left a trail of sparks that extended 20-30 feet back, and to a height of perhaps at least two metres.

[ChristiaanJ]

Does anyone else fancy having a pop at the pre-existing fire theory
I already did earlier....
Without any physical proof at all of such a fire, we only have a few highly contradictory "witness reports".
And postulating a pre-existing fire, starting a few seconds before all the conditions were reunited for a real fire, is really pushing things a bit too far from the bounds of probability and reality.
JetBlue had a nosewheel event at LAX where the wheel was ninety degrees to the Heading on landing, It left a trail of sparks that extended 20-30 feet back, and to a height of perhaps at least two metres.So?
We can all quote even worse incidents/accidents of the same style, but where is this relevant here?
We're talking about the MLG here, and a tyre burst.
Unless you are suggesting sparks from the MLG wheel after the tyre burst ignited the fire... not totally impossible, I suppose, but not even mentioned in the report as a possible cause.
Probably because some sparks well aft of the MLG would not have had enough energy to ignite the fuel leak to the extent of the flame propagating back to the wheel well (my opinion entirely).

CJ.

[Iron Duck]

ChristiaanJ

Originally Posted by Iron Duck
Does anyone else fancy having a pop at the pre-existing fire theory?
I already did earlier....
Without any physical proof at all of such a fire, we only have a few highly contradictory "witness reports".

I should have made myself clearer and said "does anyone else fancy having a pop at postulating a pre-existing fire theory?"

I'm with you and PBL on this one, and I'm only an interested SLF. Nonetheless, after PBL so beautifully skewered the "airworthiness" argument, the only possible remaining challenge to the the BEA report and the Court's conclusions might come from a pre-existing fire theory, as advanced by CAL.

Genghis Khan (alledgedly) said: "It's not enough just to win. The other side have to know that they have lost." Perhaps I'm being mischievous, but that's why I'm asking for any further theories. Let's see if they fly.

[bearfoil]

iron duck

The Wheel Spacer was left off the MLG. I assume the job of the Spacer is to insure Space between wheels. Also space between Tyres, and tyre and bits. If allowed to rub, Rubber casings can ignite into an impressive display within moments. The Tyres may have been afire before the burst, liberating already burning torch bits to then ignite the Fuel, post-burst. Burt Rutan's Space Rocket Fuel? Rubber. Not kidding. Are we sure it was not the Spacer that started the Fire/Burst, or Burst/Fire?

merely a 'post-existing' theory :ok:

da bear

[vapilot2004]

The tires would have had to have been of different diameters (inflation, tread wear) in order for them to be spinning at substantially different rates.

[jcjeant]

Hi,

http://enperspective.pagesperso-orange.fr/figure43.gif

http://enperspective.pagesperso-orange.fr/figure42.gif

Source:
Crash du Concorde: la loi de Murphy (http://enperspective.pagesperso-orange.fr/concorde.html)

[bearfoil]

Only if one limits the possibility to Tyres rubbing each other. Per the diagram from jcjeant, if the bearings were free to drift toward the center, a wobble is possible, and tyres would not track correctly on this truck. It has been a long while since I viewed the takeoff video, but I remember "seeing" the Fire start at the Wheels, not aft the Wheels.

If she had lost stability in this MLG, all manner of stress would impinge on the tyres, and the metal. A Tyre Fire is reasonable, Titanium road hazard is also possible, but slower to eventuate, and less of a trigger. Occam says Tyre Fire.

bear

[wiggy]

However, the aircraft was moving at roughly 100 m/sec, while propagation of a turbulent flame is only about 20 m/sec.
Whether the flame could still have "crept" forward along the nacelle or the fuselage until it reached the wheel well, remains an open question.



I have personal experience of an aircraft moving at around 150 m/sec suffering a fuel leak and which then ignited and the subsequent fire very, very definitely propagated forward despite the airspeeds involved . The flame remained stubbornly well and truely attached to the airframe even with IAS's in excess of 350 kts and it subsequently transpired there was significant fire damage to the a**e end of the airframe ....so the oft expressed "fact" that you can outrun a flame front at subsonic speeds seems to me to be hopelessly optimistic.

IMVHO once you have a fuel leak, an ignition source and turbulent flow/flame front all bets as to propagation are off.

Does anyone else fancy having a pop at the pre-existing fire theory

Yes, Occam to me says - fuel leak, reheat ignites the plume, which then burns forward into the structure. You don't need another ignition source, such as a tyre fire, forward of the leak, to get things going.

[singpilot]

I thought that the tire failure had damaged the Weight-on-Wheels switches/sensors AND their associated wiring on the Left MG leg, and the sparking there had been a source of the spilled / leaking fuel ignition.

Was also mentioned as the reason the crew was unable to raise the gear (the system defaulting to GROUND status when failed).

[Easy Street]

wiggy,

Did the flame propagate forward in the boundary layer in your fire? A fire started by the reheat flame would not benefit from any boundary layer effects in its attempt to 'catch up'.

[PBL]

Iron Duck,

concerning reports of fire on the right side of the aircraft, I think we can see in the front TO photo that there is nothing. Furthermore, the BEA says there are no traces. They also report the RHS engines as functioning normally, which they would not do if there were untoward combustion in the vicinity. So whether or not there was visible burning on the RHS of the aircraft, it did not affect the performance of the flight in the way in which the conflagration on the left has been shown to have done so.

So the fire question must concern mainly the conflagration on the left. The 32 cm square chunk that was exploded out of the fuel tank, and the resulting hole, is, I hope, not in question. Fuel would have been coming out of that hole in large quantity, and can be seen doing so by tracing the fire in the photographs. It is clearly seen in the photos to have ignited, and that the fire is huge. It is this fire, intuitively, and also from the investigation's statements about how the power produced by the left-side engines was affected, that we should be most concerned about. It is this fire which altered the engine parameters to reduce the thrust, and very likely would have burned through the wing maybe even before the aircraft had reached Le Bourget.

Whether or not people have observed flame fronts travelling forward on other aircraft, the BAC engineers were completely unable to reproduce a forward-travelling flame front from afterburner ignition on this aircraft in their post-crash experiments. Nobody intimately involved with this aircraft sees how the flame front could have so travelled. So ChristiaanJ's supposition remains very much alive in the minds of many. A related question is whether such damage to wiring would have been pre-existing, or whether it would have been engendered by debris from the tire burst. I would guess this question will remain forever unanswerable.

Concerning sparks from tires due to misalignment - bearfoil, do give us a break! Look at the size of the spacer in the diagrams; look at the gap between the wheels; draw the obvious conclusion.

Also, does anyone see the burning in the photos anywhere near the left main gear bogie? No? Neither do I. So how exactly is anything to do with that bogie supposed to have ignited the fire?

PBL

[BRE]

The links to PBL's pieces at abnormaldistriubution point to nowhere - anybody got working links?

[foxy2600]

CF6-50 Core Cowl wear strips were notoriously bad for fretting and falling out. The problem was then, that the preload on the over-centre latches was reduced and the consequence of that was in extreme cases that the cowls undid themselves and as I saw on one sorry B747 , they came off - sheared at the pylon hinges. A mod came out, inserting a stainless steel screw/pin which effectively locked the two cowls together.
Now, the strips still got renewed and they were always meant to be made of Stainless Steel. The report shows that the Titanium strip that alegedly caused the crash, to have been attached with Cherry-Loc rivets. Had they been monel with stainless mandrels, I doubt accident would have happened. Stainless wear-strip, ally Cherries, strip on runway, tire bursts, Concorde in Hotel except for one thing....... Titanium burns with a fierce bright flame. Source of ignition??

[infrequentflyer789]

The links to PBL's pieces at abnormaldistriubution point to nowhere - anybody got working links?

I think they've been quoted in someone's post above and that has mangled them. I think these are working links:

http://www.abnormaldistribution.org/2010/12/06/concorde-ten-years-on/
http://www.abnormaldistribution.org/2010/12/09/concorde-ten-years-on-part-2/

If not, trying to put in text form so it doesn't get messed up, you want:www.abnormaldistribution.org (http://www.abnormaldistribution.org)
then either of: 2010/12/06/concorde-ten-years-on
2010/12/09/concorde-ten-years-on-part-2
Thanks to PBL for posting these, well written and well worth reading.

[Feathers McGraw]

PBL

Please note that you've quoted rotation speeds in your articles in kph when the numbers used are actually in mph (or more likely in knots). Probably a good idea to correct them.....

[BRE]

ok, found the cross-examination

was the whole 32 cm x 32 cm or was it 32 cm²

[bearfoil]

"....sparks from tires...." Words not said, and a studied response meant to mislead/demean. Sparks from H member? possibly, as well as shed bits of tyre independent, precedent, and unconnected to Titanium Strip? Of course it's possible. To be fully committed to tyre burst via Ti, at the complete exclusion of defects known to have started at Brakes release? A leap, a leap. The a/c was known to have been tracking indifferently. Yet all focus is on the Ti, conveniently lying in wait in a place that would have been benign, had she been tracking true. A theory, and worthy of attention equal to the "Slasher" theory. The Fire was a follow on, regardless of Fuel dump causation. The Titanium had not started the Fire, technically, it could have had nothing to do with it, absent a slewing airframe? All causes are contributory, except the ones that are not.

[ChristiaanJ]

BRE,
If you look at the report, it's about 30x30cm (not exactly square).
32cm² would have been less than 6x6cm.
The flow rate of the leak was about 60 kg/sec (estimated in three or four different ways).

CJ

[jcjeant]

Hi,

Appeal from Continental
Google Vertaling (http://translate.google.be/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Ffr.news.yahoo.com%2F76%2F20101213%2 Ftfr-crash-du-concorde-continental-fait-a-dbac7e9.html&sl=fr&tl=en&hl=&ie=UTF-8)

Original link:
Crash du Concorde: Continental fait appel de sa condamnation - Yahoo! Actualités (http://fr.news.yahoo.com/76/20101213/tfr-crash-du-concorde-continental-fait-a-dbac7e9.html)

[infrequentflyer789]

The a/c was known to have been tracking indifferently. Yet all focus is on the Ti, conveniently lying in wait in a place that would have been benign, had she been tracking true.

Are you reading a different report ? - the one I have from the BEA site clearly states that she was tracking true (or maybe pulling a very little to the right) until after the fire starts causing loss of thrust. Moreover, no evidence of loss of takeoff performance on the previous flights that she made with the dodgy bogie.

Sure, the Ti is in a most (in)convenient place - a foot or so either way and no accident (at least not to Concorde, maybe some other a/c...). But then, sat at the end of the runway at max weight, hear that it's shifted to an 8 knot tailwind... merde, all the way down to the other end to takeoff the other way... and again, no accident. Procurring cause ?

And then again, if the Ti strip was found but remained as "unidentified part of another a/c" then it is all too convenient and suspiciously so... but forensically matched to the bodged Ti repair to the a/c that took off 5mins before ? How to arrange that ? - unless it is the improbable truth.

[jcjeant]

Hi,

Implacable logic .... ?

In its ruling, the Court asserts that the tinker could not ignore "potentially catastrophic consequences of the bursting of a tire"


Also J. Taylor could ignorerles Risk-protection in the presence of objects (FOD) on the slopes and it can be validly argued by his counsel that he could not imagine that a tire burst on a FOD or causing a chain of events like those that occurred July 25, 2000 provided he could not ignore the potentially catastrophic consequences of the bursting of a tire.


This is a serious mistake because, as the BEA page 177 of his report, it is precisely the accident July 25, 2000 which showed that the destruction of tires could be catastrophic!


The accident of July 25, 2000 has shown that the destruction of a single tire event which can not be said that it could happen has had catastrophic consequences in a very short time while the crew is able to restore the situation.
Consequently and without prejudice to additional elements that might appear during the BEA survey and AAIB recommend to the Directorate General of Civil Aviation and the French Civil Aviation Authority of United Unique:
Certificates of airworthiness of Concorde be suspended pending may have been put in place appropriate measures to ensure a satisfactory level of safety regarding the risk the destruction of Tyre.


How Mr. Taylor would have known it when all the players of prevention were unaware of it ?

Comment:
If the President of the Tribunal is satisfied that the bursting of a tire could have catastrophic consequences for Concorde, she joined the camp of those who expose the bankruptcy of feedback in the drama of July 25, 2000.

This now includes all stakeholders unambiguous monitoring of the airworthiness of the aircraft.

Source:
Concorde : la grave erreur des juges ! : Les dossiers noirs du transport aérien (http://henrimarnetcornus.20minutes-blogs.fr/archive/2010/12/14/concorde-la-grave-erreur-des-juges.html)

[oldchina]

IF they were at MDTOW and...

Was an 8 kt tailwind (Tower, but denied by Meteo France) then...

They were several tonnes above the tyre speed limited permissible take-off weight.

[ChristiaanJ]

jcjeant,
Mr. Taylor was simply the victim of his gross incompetence 'en l'excercise de son métier', leading to involuntary homicide through a chain of events he indeed cannot have envisaged.

"The dumb shall rule the Earth"... or maybe they already do... ?

Much like a car mechanic totally botching a brake repair, leading to a multiple pile-up on a motorway killing several people?

He got off with a suspended sentence.

oldchina,
Please could you stop regurgitating this nonsense?
They were at just as nearly at MTOW as not to matter, and actual wind was as near zero knots as not to matter.
Neither had any impact on the way the accident happened.

CJ

[jcjeant]

Hi,

The dumb shall rule the Earth"... or maybe they already do... ?

Much like a car mechanic totally botching a brake repair, leading to a multiple pile-up on a motorway killing several people?Methink it's not exactly the same.
One side .. we have a judge telling (verdict) that the mechanic as to be aware (before the 25 July 2000) that a tyre blow can have catastrophic consequences.

On the other side we have the BEA (after the 25 July 2000) telling that a tyre blow can have catastrophic consequences and so ask the Concorde be grounded until technical services find a remedy for have (again?) a safe plane regarding consequences of blow tyre (s)
How one can ask to the mechanic to be aware of a thing the BEA and AAIB were not aware despite the many accidents involving blow tyres who occured during the commercial service of the Concorde.
Methink the BEA and AAIB had better insights than the mechanic for see a possible catastrophe unfolding.
He got off with a suspended sentence.
The BEA and AAIB got off without sentence
Off course we can argue on this for years :)
We have now to rest and wait what will be the verdict of the appeal ...

[infrequentflyer789]

Hi,

Methink it's not exactly the same.
One side .. we have a judge telling (verdict) that the mechanic as to be aware (before the 25 July 2000) that a tyre blow can have catastrophic consequences.

On the other side we have the BEA (after the 25 July 2000) telling that a tyre blow can have catastrophic consequences and so ask the Concorde be grounded until technical services find a remedy for have (again?) a safe plane regarding consequences of blow tyre (s)
How one can ask to the mechanic to be aware of a thing the BEA and AAIB were not aware

Ah, but now you are comparing things that are, methinks, not exactly the same.

The legal test (I believe, although may not be exactly the same in French law) for the mechanics actions is "forseeable harm". Not forseeable death, and not the actual death that occurred being forseeable - simply that the action was dangerous and could cause (non-trivial) harm. The court decided yes.

For an aircraft mechanic, I would say that a tyre burst causing harm should be obvious. They have killed before Concorde, and since, and no doubt will again.
They have also caused hull losses before, and since, although it is rare - but hull loss is not required to be forseeable, only some harm.


For the regulator (not actually BEA), on the other hand, the question you are asking (and the court too) is should they have forseen that a burst tyre could cause massive fuel tank hole and consequent fatal fire risk, and as a result required tyre and/or tank modifications. The court decided no. I would agree. Unprecedented - see PBLs articles for far better explanation than I could write.


So, two different decisions - but the questions were not actually the same, so no contradiction.

[ Also note that whilst one might believe the court decision to be correct, that does not mean that one has to also believe that a manslaughter prosecution is the right thing for aviation safety. ]

[jcjeant]

Hi,

For the regulator (not actually BEA), on the other hand, the question you are asking (and the court too) is should they have forseen that a burst tyre could cause massive fuel tank hole and consequent fatal fire risk, and as a result required tyre and/or tank modifications. The court decided no. I would agree. Unprecedented - see PBLs articles for far better explanation than I could writeCan you tell me from who or from where the regulator can have or receive informations (in this case DGAC ) ?
Methink is from the BEA (recommandations after end of investigations or as the case of Concorde .. during the investigation)
Unprecedented ?
Only the fire and crash was ... fuel leak was not.... (Washington-aircraft scrapped)
What was the recommandations from the BEA to the regulator ?
Why not make the recommandations made in 2000 ? cause no victims ?
When you have fuel leak ... risk of fire is obvious

For an aircraft mechanic, I would say that a tyre burst causing harm should be obviousBut not should be obvious for the experts of the BEA or AAIB ?
Well .. they have seen and investigate some tyres blows on the Concorde before the year 2000 and some were scaring.....

[ChristiaanJ]

... Washington - aircraft scrapped...Wrong...
The aircraft was F-BVFC, not only not scrapped, but even the last Air France Concorde to fly *) .
What was the recommandations from the BEA to the regulator ?Read the report.
File f-fc790614.pdf on the BEA site.
Whether these recommandations were all applied to the letter is of course not mentioned in the report itself.

CJ


*) It was F-BVFD that was scrapped.
Damaged during a hard landing in Dakar and repaired.
Stayed in service, but continued to suffer from increased fuel consumption, hence first candidate when Air France withdraw one of the aircraft from service.
Remained in storage for years, and was finally scrapped when serious corrosion was found.

[bearfoil]

F-BVFD

How long was she allowed to fly seriously "out of rig"? Not especially comforting re: BEA and its decisions?? The pursuit of money at the expense of safety constantly "Corrodes" the Industry's "Badge" ?? The history of Concorde is replete with corner cutting, and a general disrespect for the aircraft itself and the people who flew her. IMO.

At the risk of descending into the more "fundamental", aren't we entertaining the effects of "sloppy maintenance" around?? Even a long established "Non-Fix" of tyre problems. Again, my point is to draw attention to those who "Game" the Process of safe flight, not the relative aspects of culpability for an accident seemingly caused by crap maintenance. It is this inclination to be satisfied with "Blame" as a conclusion rather than fixing systemic problems that engendered the tragedy, that baffles me.

[ChristiaanJ]

How long was F-BVFD allowed to fly seriously "out of rig"? Sorry, but it wasn't "seriously out of rig" (where did you get that?).
'FD was delivered to AF in March 1977, and Dakar happened in November 1977.
Even before the incident, 'FD was already known as a gas guzzler ... don't forget those aircraft were still all pretty well hand-built.
The added weight from the repairs, and the residual distortion of the airframe, obviously didn't improve that.
Nevertheless, 'FD stayed in regular service until May 1982, when it was withdrawn when the Paris-Dakar-Rio route was closed down.
It wasn't scrapped until 1994.

There was never any question of the aircraft not being airworthy after the (approved) repairs. The increase in fuel consumption (hence limited range) was an operational problem, not an airworthiness problem.

CJ

[bearfoil]

Love is blind? An a/c at Mach two that is hobbled in any area by being "Hand Built", or out of rig noticeably, and demonstrably gets my attention and raises the same questions as above. I consider this a friendly disagreement, ChristiaanJ, and I am in awe of this a/c no less than anyone.

She was a modern day "Cinderella" in many ways, forced to do duty on short, dirty runways, prevented from making money by idiotic Boom Laws, and forced to wear shoes that were too loose, or tight, as the case may be. She was abused, rather than exalted, by the operators, and the Regulators. IMO.

Thanks for responding.

bear

[forget]

.......or out of rig noticeably,

It wasn't 'out of rig'. :ugh: Why do you keep claiming that it was?

[bearfoil]

forget

".....and the residual distortion of the airframe...." ChristiaanJ, AE

Not my claim, Sir.

delete/delete?

[ChristiaanJ]

forget, bearfoil,
Before this gets out of proportion....
Don't forget, that the aircraft did not just get about a foot longer at Mach 2, but it also changed shape, due both through the aerodynamic heating, and the various forces.
IIRC during the test flying there were various tweaks to the leading edge and the wing shape to fully account for those effects.
And go and have a look inside the wing, and you'll find a multitude of adjustable rods, that determined the final wing shape during production, and afterwards.
Small differences between aircraft could have disproportionate effects.

CJ

[bearfoil]

The Blackbird had corrugated skin, the first since the Ford Trimotor. It flew at M3, and made no attempt to conserve fuel. My point is that when "Distortion" gets to be quantifiable, some thing might be considered other than lamenting poor SFC??

What was the difference prior/post Dakar??

[ChristiaanJ]

The Blackbird had corrugated skin, the first since the Ford Trimotor. It flew at M3, and made no attempt to conserve fuel. My point is that when "Distortion" gets to be quantifiable, some thing might be considered other than lamenting poor SFC??I'm afraid I'm totally missing your point....

The Blackbird was a military aircraft, and flew from one flying 'gas station' to the next. It didn't ever bother to tank up properly when taking off... first job was getting to 30,000ft and "fill 'er up".

On Concorde it was only during the flight testing that the distortion became fully quantifiable (of course we had a good idea beforehand), and we then tweaked that to get those extra few percent in SFC.

What was the difference prior/post Dakar??I've never seen the figures pre-Dakar.
Post-Dakar, CDG-JFK was supposedly "on the edge".

CJ

[mike-wsm]

Why all this argument about an airplane that should never have been built? Concord (proper spelling) was a schoolboy's and housewives' dream, wow, the world's fastest, but had no range and no payload and was so utterly uneconomic that nobody bought it. The two governments who were daft enough to fund it had to provide free aircraft to their national airlines to get anywhere near to an 'operating profit'. There was an enormous waste of national engineering resources that would have been much better directed to a reasoned commercially viable project.

Apologies to all the good people who put so much of their working lives into the design and fabrication of Concord (proper spelling) but even they were fully aware they were getting off on technology and being paid to go in completey the wrong direction.

[M2dude]

Oh dear. Just when I thought that this thread had heard from just about every walk of aviation life and opinion, we now have this drivel from the totally mis-informed, totally biased, totally inflamitory and totally wrong, idiotic posting moron. CORRECT SPELLING!!!!

Dude :O

[mike-wsm]

Dude - Thanks for that, gives me the opportunity to tell the tale. It was my school-chum Nobby Clark who dreamed up the name Concord and his Dad who worked at Filton suggested it to the management. They thought it was a really good name, because, as Nobby explained, Concord means the same thing in English and French - agreement. Alas it turned out anything but. The French insisted on spelling it Concorde, and we stuck to the original Concord, for our plane which was after all designed at Filton with engines designed just down the road at Patchway. It became a major political issue, and the British government, anxious to maintain cooperation between Bristol and Toulouse on this very prestigious project, gave in and adopted the French spelling, saving face by saying how charmingly quaint it was. All because my school-chum Nobby Clarke had a Good Idea. Sorry, Nobby, is it Clark or Clarke? San fairy Anne. Ca ne fait rien.

[M2dude]

It was the Bristol 223 that was designed at Filton, not Concorde. Fair enough that the 223 is closer to what finally became Concorde than the Super Caravelle, but nonetheless the final design benifited from both contributions.
But the fact remains that the name adapted for the aircraft was Concorde, and it was agreed by both the French and the British that the French Letter 'E' would be added. :=
Concord is both a town in Massachusetts and a word in the English dictionary. Concorde is the name of arguably the finest commercial aircraft of all time, and that's the way that it will always remain. :ok:
(I've been closely involved with the aircraft since the beginning of 1974, so have more than just a passing knowledge of such things).

Regards
Dude :O

[ChristiaanJ]

As anybody knows who's ever tried to look up Concorde on Google, Concord is also the name of a 1950s Chrysler car, and a lot of American garages....

CJ


PS : Amusing to see how much stupidity, ignorance and unnecessary unpleasantness can be crammed into one brief post, isn't it?

[mike-wsm]

. . . we now have this drivel from the totally mis-informed, totally biased, totally inflamitory and totally wrong, idiotic posting moron . . .

It is indeed an honour and a privilege to be so described by one who has sat at the droopy end for so many years.

We worked in 'another place' on Filton Hill and on quiet days were able to take a leisurely stroll around the Brabazon hangar where the later Concordes were being assembled. I think I can recall seeing G-BOAG nearing completion. What a crying shame it was that, after securing the block of letters G-BOAA to G-BOAG, the airline changed its name. It would have been glorious to see BOAC Concorde G-BOAC.

[Storminnorm]

Didn't BOAC stand for Buy Only American Crap??

[infrequentflyer789]

Unprecedented ?
Only the fire and crash was ... fuel leak was not.... (Washington-aircraft scrapped)


Fuel leak was unprecedented in scale. Mechanism of tank rupture was not widely known outside of military work. To quote PBL (see link below): "a much larger hole, two to maybe three orders of magnitude larger than any that had previously occurred, made by a completely different mechanism." Even if fuel at Dulles incident had ignited, and stayed alight, the fire wouldn't have had the same effect on engine thrust (or caused the level of wing damage) which caused the crash.


What was the recommandations from the BEA to the regulator ?
Why not make the recommandations made in 2000 ? cause no victims ?
When you have fuel leak ... risk of fire is obvious
Recommendations that were made would be different because of massive difference in scale of the damage. Currently, regulators make rules based on engine ingestion of a 4lb bird. If that became a 400lb bird, the rules and recommendations would have to be very different.


>> For an aircraft mechanic, I would say that a tyre burst causing harm should be obvious
But not should be obvious for the experts of the BEA or AAIB ?
Of course it would be obvious to both. You seem to be still thinking that the same question is being applied to the mechanic / continental, and the regulator, with different answers. That is not the case. Q1: Was it forseeable that an aircraft tire burst can cause significant injury (or death).
Ans: By regulator: Yes. By Mechanic / Continental: Yes

Q2: Was it forseeable that a tire burst could result in a Concorde turning into a flying fireball.
Ans: By regulator: No. By Mechanic / Continental: No
No difference in the standard of forseeabilitybeing applied to the mechanic and the regulator.

The difference is in the tests for manslaughter, you would need to have a "yes" to Q1 (among other questions) to convict the mechanic and/or continental, but a "yes" to Q2 to convict the regulator. The mechanic is reponsible for a bad repair (outwith the rules), causing a fatality. A test of "forseeable harm" does not require him to forsee what acutally happened, only that his action could lead to some harm. The regulator is not responsible for continental's bad repair, only potentially for the effect of the tire burst causing massive fuel leak, fire, loss of thrust, crash. Hence, you have to have a "yes" to Q2 to convict, and PBL has already demolished that in cross examination. http://www.abnormaldistribution.org/2010/12/09/concorde-ten-years-on-part-2/

[chrisN]

I don't understand why a different question is not appropriate for the Mechanic: “Was it foreseeable that using titanium instead of stainless steel could cause a tyre burst?

I would have thought from the Mechanic's point of view the answer would be “No”.


Chris N

[Jig Peter]

Why, sir do you say Concorde should never have been built ? Before the 747, experience had shown that speed paid - remember that Concorde, carrying about 100 passengers could do 2 transatlantic round trips per day, while current aircraft at the time could only do one, carrying less than 200 passengers (argue about these figures if you will - I'm happy here with approximations as I'm not doing a cost/benefit analysis). At fuel prices before the first big rise, Concorde's economics worked.
That's what industry and governments had to go on, apart from prestige.
Simplistically, as the hare compared with tortoises, Concorde was supposed to be to its slower contemporaries what the Comet was to its (leaving aside the Comet's own weaknesses, discovered later, such as square windows and the inability of riveters at deH's to achieve the tight tolerances needed at the corners).
Your insistence on dropping the 'e' is peculiarly pedantic - the aircraft was properly named "Concorde" by agreement, to symbolise the "joint-ness" of the project.
You can carp all you will - Concorde was an immense technical success - and scared the bejasus out of "the cousins" who didn't manage to achieve anything like it - and incidentally put whatever hindrances they could to its operation.
Personally, being a peaceful type*, I also think it was "good" that, while other nations' large supersonic aircraftwere designed to destroy, Concorde was designed for peaceful purposes.

*But at the time a proud member of Britain's airborne striking power.

[bearfoil]

I'll Nibble at infrequentflyer's conclusions.

Should the Regulator have foreseen a tyre burst as potentially causing a castastrophic Fire? Emphatically, YES. That was the upshot of the entire Tyre "problem".

Should the Mechanic have foreseen such a catastrophe? Emphatically, NO.

We see the Titanium Strip post crash. Hardware store rivets fastened haphazardly by an indifferent "Expert"? Irregular indexing of attachment points? Boy Howdy.

Why are we focused on the Metal? It is the "craftsmanship" that gets my attention.

Should the Mechanic have foreseen his "Rub Strip" falling Off?? Boy howdy.

bear

[infrequentflyer789]

I don't understand why a different question is not appropriate for the Mechanic: “Was it foreseeable that using titanium instead of stainless steel could cause a tyre burst?
The material of the repair has been latched on by the media, IMO incorrectly, probably because it's easy to report & understand. The repair was also badly executed, and not by the book, in a number of other ways. This is likely far more significant, but talking about incorrectly drilled rivet holes is too complicated for todays media. As Bear has just said - it's the craftsmanship, not the metal.

The series of questions (as I understand it, and I'm not a lawyer and if I was, not a French one) would be:
Did the mechanic (or the company) knowlingly act outside of safety rules / laws (mens rea)
Did he, or should he, have known that this action could cause someone harm
Was this action an essential cause (sine qua non) of a deathIt's the second of these that the tire burst question is part of, and might be broken down into:
Was it forseeable that the bodged repair would fall off ?
Was it forseeable that it would do so on the runway (at t/o thrust) ?
Was it forseeable that this strip on a runway could damage an aircraft (esp. tires) ?
Was it forseeable that a damaged aircraft tire could seriously hurt someone (even if its "only" the next mechanic who inspects it) ?[ I think it's also possible that (2) becomes irrelevant if you knowingly breach a rule designed to ensure safety in (1) - it might be held that this automatically implies that you should have known that your action could cause harm ]

I think it's notable that in media statements (I haven't read the transcripts, my French would make that a somewhat slow job) Continental's lawyers have never raised defending (1) or (2), only (3). Possibly because they judged that they simply had no reasonable defence to (1)&(2). It appears they based their defence on eyewitness evidence (with no physical eveidence) of the Concorde already being on fire, and that the massive fuel leak did not contribute to the fatal nature of that fire - i.e. "it would have crashed and burnt without the tire burst".

[mike-wsm]

. . . Concorde was an immense technical success . . .

Yes, an immense technical success. But not, I think, a commercial one.

Sales figures
Concorde: 0
747: 1400+

Hardly surprising if you look at weights. The per passenger cost of flying an airplane can be represented as the weight per seat at takeoff. This is indicative of fuel consumption regardless of speed because:
Energy required is (distance x drag)
Drag is (weight divided by L/D)

747 1500lb/seat
VC-10 2200lb/seat
Brabazon 2900lb/seat
Concorde 4000lb/seat

Which would you buy?

[Iron Duck]

mike-wsm

747 1500lb/seat
VC-10 2200lb/seat
Brabazon 2900lb/seat
Concorde 4000lb/seat

Which would you buy?

747-100 1,626lb/seat: commercial success
Concorde 3,433lb/seat: commercial failure
Britannia 310 (close to your heart, surely?) 1,330lb/seat: commercial failure
707-320B 2,269lb/seat: commercial success
VC-10 2,220lb/seat: commercial failure
727-200 1,108lb/seat: commercial success
HS Trident 3B 861lb/seat: commercial failure
Douglas DC3 792lb - 1,013lb/seat depending on config: commercial success
Vickers Viscount 810 900lb/seat: commercial success.

All MTOW/PAX figures from Wikipedia.

It looks to me as if there's a bit more to it than simple MTOW/passengers. How is it that the Viscount supplanted the DC3? Why aren't we all still flying around in Daks, or Trident 3s? Oh, because of the A380, which in 853 pax 1-class config manages 667lb/seat.

Edit 17/12/2010: the quote is from mike-wsm, not Jig Peter, to whom I first wrongly attributed it.

[Ex Cargo Clown]

Yes, an immense technical success. But not, I think, a commercial one.

Sales figures
Concorde: 0
747: 1400+

Hardly surprising if you look at weights. The per passenger cost of flying an airplane can be represented as the weight per seat at takeoff. This is indicative of fuel consumption regardless of speed because:
Energy required is (distance x drag)
Drag is (weight divided by L/D)

747 1500lb/seat
VC-10 2200lb/seat
Brabazon 2900lb/seat
Concorde 4000lb/seat

Which would you buy?

What a bizarre comment.

You have clearly never heard of words such as "yield" or "revenue management".

:ugh:

[PBL]

What an astonishing post from mike-wsm! And what a reasonable reply from M2Dude!

mike-wsm is judging an aircraft designed and built in the 1960's by the standards of a 2010 airline accountant. And thereby wins the booby prize for inappropriate insight.

He suggests the engineers knew they were working on a sham. He may be generalising from someone he knew. (My advice: pick better company.)

The engineers I know who worked on Concorde considered it the pinnacle of their careers. And went on to work on the A320, A330 and A340, all of which benefitted technically from the experience of designing and maintaining Concorde.

Let's look back at the 1960's, when Concorde was designed and flew.

In 1961, a largish Mach 2+ airplane, the B-58 Hustler, flew from Texas via Washington DC and New York to Paris Le Bourget for the air show, mostly at Mach 2 (with aerial refuelling of course). The crew won the Mackay Trophy and the Harmon Trophy for their feat. All that way! That fast!

A week later, the airplane crashed during a flight display at the show. It wasn't exactly easy to handle. When you lost an engine at Mach 2, the airplane broke apart. The USAF purchased 128. By November 1963 there were 95 remaining. They had lost over a quarter of the fleet to accidents. And that was the state of the art in 1961.

Less than eight years later, an aircraft flew that was to perform this feat routinely, many times a day, without aerial refuelling, and with some hundred people on board sipping champagne, rather than three people, two of whom could barely see outside.

The Concorde was the most high-performance aircraft of its day, and of any day since. The aeronautical understanding derived during its development is likely unmatched by any other project in aeronautics.

And that aircraft flew after 64 years of powered flight, and continued flying, doing its thing very well, for twenty-four years of service until the Paris crash (after 95 years of powered flight), and only stopped because EADS decided to discontinue support. We are now at 105 years. With one airplane, one airplane only, lost. Everyone else in those twenty-four years had a good flight.

mike-wsm strikes me as the kind of contributor who would say on an arts-appreciation site that Picasso was just another scribbler, and that his plumber knew it.

PBL

[M2dude]

Ex Cargo Clown
What a bizarre comment. You have clearly never heard of words such as "yield" or "revenue management".
Absolutely right sir, I completely agree with you.:ok: The sad fact for the Concorde detractors here is that for BA at least, a fully laden Concorde earned far more revenue/operating profit than a fully laden subsonic of any size or flavour. As much as I've tried to stay out of this thread I feel that someone has to speak up and defend the aeroplane that many of us love dearly, in the face of some really mis-informed and total drivel being posted. (Including even from one who obviously worked at the GW Division at Filton; one would expect better of such people).

PBL
And that aircraft flew after 64 years of powered flight, and continued flying, doing its thing very well, for twenty-four years of service until the Paris crash (after 95 years of powered flight), and only stopped because EADS decided to discontinue support. We are now at 105 years. With one airplane, one airplane only, lost. Everyone else in those twenty-four years had a good flight.
mike-wsm strikes me as the kind of contributor who would say on an arts-appreciation site that Picasso was just another scribbler, and that his plumber knew it.
Very well said PBL, you phrased your point beautifully. I suppose it is easier for some to criticize something far easier, if it's from a point of view of ignorance and stupidity. (The point about the 'E' in Concorde was absolutely pathetic).

Regards
Dude :O

[ChristiaanJ]

Yes, an immense technical success. But not, I think, a commercial one.Nobody is arguing that....
But maybe you could at least get your "facts" riight, rather than quote urban legends?

Sales figures
Concorde: 0
747: 1400+Nope.
Nine were sold to the two national airlines.
Admittedly with some prompting, and probably at a discount relative to the catalogue price, but they were sold.
Only the five remaining white tails were later ceded for a nominal sum each to the airlines, rather than let them rot.

Even so, in 1984 BA thought it worth it to "buy out of" the government subsidy arrangement and acquire the spares holding and G-BBDG for about £16M, and went on to make an operating profit.

The rest of your comments are not really worth mentioning.

And what exactly does this have to do with the subject of this thread?

CJ

[DozyWannabe]

The 747 almost sank Boeing in her early days, and her eventual success was at least in part down to the technical issues that plagued the DC-10, and the financial issues that plagued the TriStar. Remember that the term "Jumbo Jet" was originally coined to describe all three.

It's also worth remembering that the European aviation market was a very different beast to that of the US in the '60s and '70s, simply due to the vast difference in size of the countries involved. The market for widebodies in Europe was very limited at first - subsonic air travel in the UK and France was catered for by Viscounts, Vanguards, Caravelles and Tridents - none of which carried many more passengers than Concorde.

[Brian Abraham]

Re the Concorde name and costs. From Wiki, but it gels with the memory I have.

Reflecting the treaty between the British and French governments which led to Concorde's construction, the name Concorde is from the French word concorde (IPA: [kɔ̃kɔʁd]), which has an English cognate, concord (IPA: /ˈkɒŋkɔrd/). Both words mean agreement, harmony or union.

The aircraft was initially referred to in the UK as Concorde, with the French spelling, but was officially changed to Concord by Harold Macmillan in response to a perceived slight by Charles de Gaulle. In 1967, at the French roll-out in Toulouse the British Government Minister for Technology, Tony Benn announced that he would change the spelling back to Concorde. This created a nationalist uproar that died down when Benn stated that the suffixed ‹e› represented "Excellence, England, Europe and Entente (Cordiale)." In his memoirs, he recounts a tale of a letter from an irate Scotsman claiming: "[Y]ou talk about 'E' for England, but part of it is made in Scotland." Given Scotland’s contribution of providing the nose cone for the aircraft, Benn replied, "[I]t was also 'E' for 'Écosse' (the French name for Scotland) — and I might have added 'e' for extravagance and 'e' for escalation as well!"

By around 1981 in the UK, the future for Concorde looked bleak. The British government had lost money operating Concorde every year, and moves were afoot to cancel the service entirely. A cost projection came back with greatly reduced metallurgical testing costs because the test rig for the wings had built up enough data to last for 30 years and could be shut down. Despite this, the government was not keen to continue. In late 1983, the managing director of BA, Sir John King, convinced the government to sell the aircraft outright to (the then state owned, later privatised) BA for £16.5 million plus the first year’s profits.

Sir John King realised that he had a premier product that was underpriced, and after carrying out a market survey, British Airways discovered that their target customers thought that Concorde was more expensive than it actually was. They progressively raised prices and service quality to match these perceptions. It is reported that British Airways then ran Concorde at a profit, unlike their French counterpart. British Airways's profits have been reported to be up to £50 million in the most profitable years, with a total revenue of £1.75 billion, before costs of £1 billion.

[DozyWannabe]

Tony Benn announced that he would change the spelling back to Concorde. This created a nationalist uproar that died down when Benn stated that the suffixed ‹e› represented "Excellence, England, Europe and Entente (Cordiale)." In his memoirs, he recounts a tale of a letter from an irate Scotsman claiming: "[Y]ou talk about 'E' for England, but part of it is made in Scotland." Given Scotland’s contribution of providing the nose cone for the aircraft, Benn replied, "[I]t was also 'E' for 'Écosse' (the French name for Scotland) — and I might have added 'e' for extravagance and 'e' for escalation as well!"

Whatever one may think of the guy's political views, there's no arguing that he was and remains as sharp as a tack - something very much missing in today's PR-obsessed political class.

[fleigle]

Excuse me if this has already been posted or mentioned, I have been on vacation and am trying to catch up.

From Aviation Week Dec. 10, 2010
Editorial: Justice, Safety Require Balance | AVIATION WEEK (http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/generic/story_generic.jsp?channel=awst&id=news/awst/2010/12/13/AW_12_13_2010_p58-275593.xml&headline=Editorial:%20Justice,%20Safety%20Require%20Balance)

[SLFinAZ]

nothing more need be said.

For a modern commercial aircraft to be deemed airworthy, it must be able to survive a blowout. Before the accident, there had been 57 cases of Concordes’ tires bursting or deflating. Twelve of those incidents led to structural damage to a wing or fuel tank, and six of those led to penetrations of tanks. The bottom line is that, for the Concorde, there was a 10% chance a blowout could lead to a ruptured fuel tank.

[lomapaseo]

nothing more need be said

unfortunately it says nothing about the probability that a crash would occur following a blowout.

are we to be left to imagine what needs to be said?

just citing random statistics without benefit of weighting gain vs risk to us personally weighs on our minds until we just ignore the subject.

[PBL]

nothing more need be said.

Except to point out facile thinking by someone offering an opinion on a subject on which heshe appears to know little. So here goes. lomapaseo points in out in a couple of words. It'll take me a little longer.


For a modern commercial aircraft to be deemed airworthy, it must be able to survive a blowout.


Incorrect. Let's take it step by step. For a commercial transport to be deemed airworthy, it has to be certified. The document that deems it airworthy is called an "airworthiness certificate".

To be certified, it must be successfully argued that the risk of any catastrophic event is extremely improbable. "Extremely improbable" means, basically, unlikely to occur within the expected total fleet lifetime.


Before the accident, there had been 57 cases of Concordes’ tires bursting or deflating. Twelve of those incidents led to structural damage to a wing or fuel tank, and six of those led to penetrations of tanks. The bottom line is that, for the Concorde, there was a 10% chance a blowout could lead to a ruptured fuel tank.

Let us accept these figures for the sake of this argument. There is obviously a missing step from this to airworthy/not airworthy. (So much for the claim that "nothing more needs to be said"!)

The missing step is: assessing the risk that a ruptured fuel tank, in the form in which it had been known from those 6 incidents, could engender a catastrophic event.

Exactly what that risk could be taken to be, in advance of the crash, is a matter I have already addressed in my blog post. Suffice it to say here that, as far as anyone could tell beforehand, it fit in the category of "extremely improbable".

So I have trouble seeing here what SLFinAZ is trying to argue. (So much, again, for the claim that "nothing more needs to be said")

PBL

[M2dude]

OK, could I possibly interject here with a few historical and technical FACTS? Thank you all, and please bear with me:
FACT 1: First of all Concorde was a delta winged SST, it is quite possible/probable that any viable SST would require a similar configuration.
FACT 2: Any such design (obviously) requires that the landing gear will have to nestle somewhere well within the shadow of the wing, and hence the fuel tanks. This in turn will make the fuel tanks potentially vulnerable to the effects of tyre blow-out.
FACT 3: The high rolling speed of the above design requires very high pressure tyres, themselves being more prone to fragmentation blow-outs than lower pressure tyres. These blow-outs are as the result of either FOD damage at high speed, or taking off with a part deflated tyre (due again to FOD damage).
FACT 4: To minimise potential risks you either produce a near 'blow-out' proof tyre or protect as much of the structure/systems as is possible. Technology in the 1960s, 70s, 80s and early 90s did not exist to produce a near burst proof tyre, and so modifications WERE carried out to 'beef up' vulnerable pieces of structure and electrical/hydraulic routing, as well as modifying the braking system power supplies. These modifications were as a result of experience gained through tyre failure incidents in airline service.
FACT 5: We would all have to admit in hindsight that the original Kleber and Dunlop tyres fitted to Concorde were potentially far too 'explosive'. However until the development of the superb Michelin NZG tyre in the very late 1990s there was no real technical alternative.
FACT 6: A tyre deflation detection system system was fitted to the aircraft in the late 1980s to give the crew warning of any more than a 10% deflation. The idea of this was to prevent a take-off attempt with a ruptured tyre, and worked very well, preventing many potential blow-out incidents.
FACT 7: All structural damage prior to July 2000 was as a result of HARD material impact, and not this alleged 'hydraulic' rupture, due to large soft impact material, (the tyre). There was I repeat NO experience of this prior to Gonesse.
FACT 8: BA carried out a modification to the water defelctor (or 'cow catcher') fitted to the front of the wheels. This modification was to fit a steel cable through the water deflector structure, so that in the event of a high energy tyre failure, the deflector would not disintegrate and fly off in all directions and damage the aircraft skin. After this modification was embodied THERE WERE NO MORE BA AIRCRAFT PUNCTURED FUEL TANK INCIDENTS... NOT ONE!!!! (The very last such incident was in October 1993; a full 10 years before services ended in 2003).

Every incident, every event was investigated to see if anything could be done to prevent it occuring again, or minimise the effects of such an event if it did occur. Nothing, but NOTHING was ever ignored.

Much is made of the Air France incident at IAD in June 1979, and as serious as it was (a double blow-out), I'd like to put a few things in context here. The big 'hole right through the wing' although technically true is not quite what it seemed. The hole that daylight and debris could be seen through was the single skinned and low stressed panel that was fitted over the undercarriage. (This panel could be easily removed for maintenance even). There was however tank puncturing which is always of course regarded as very serious, but the fuel loss was miniscule compared to Gonesse. This incident WAS unique in terms of the amount of structural and systems damage done, and salutary lessons were learned as a result of this.

I will not go into the why's and wherefores here of the Gonesse tragedy, I have my own opinions, based on what I know to be fact and not rumours and fantasies, that differ substantially from the BEA report, I will not share them here. But one thing we must all agree on that this was a terrible tragedy that should never have happened, and shows us all just how terrible aircraft accidents can in fact be, and no aircraft is immune from such tragedies.
One final interesting point however from all the hindsight 20/20's out there is why Kevlar linings were not fitted to the fuel tanks years ago? The awful truth is that they alone would quite possibly not have stemmed the leak from #5 fuel tank on F-BTSC sufficiently to have prevented the ensuing fire, and that on their own they were really only of limited use. This is not my opinion, but that of the chief British engineer involved with the Warton 'fire tunnel' research. The NZG tyre has to be regarded as the main preventer of such a tragedy never occurring again.

Regards
Dude :O

[mike-wsm]

Britannia 310 (close to your heart, surely?) 1,330lb/seat: commercial failure

Ah, cut to the quick, yes sir, very much so, an elegant and beautiful aeroplane, the very best ever to be produced at the Filton Rest Home for Tired Engineers.

Alas it was those silly folded Proteus engines that delayed its introduction into service when the flight test team had to traipse around the world looking for weather conditions that would freeze up that daft U-band, inherited from trying to bury the engine ahead of the main spar within the wings of the Brabazon and Princess.

Apologies to all for the thread drift, but it's all part of the Filton story. It fascinates me to look back on our past 'successes' and to see what white elephants they were in real terms when compared with those very few real success stories, where aircraft are produced in greater than 1000-off quantities. One of the key elements is humility, the ability to accept reality and adapt to it. The British national character is one of arrogance and an arrogant political system driving arrogant company management will never yield commercial success.

Footnote re my comment on weight per seat - of course there are many boxes to tick before an aircraft can become a success. My point is that excess weight is a surefire commercial killer. If you are double the weight per seat you use double the fuel per seat and carry a huge economic penalty. Even when fuel is cheap you have to appreciate your product is over-sensitive to any increase in fuel price. Sensitivity analysis is key to all engineering and economic calculations.

For M2 Dude - yes, 829, just a prawn.

I'll have to sign off here and avoid the lynch mob, many thanks for your kindness and hospitality to this armchair onlooker.

[Iron Duck]

SLFinAz

As you post consists of quotes from the Aviation Week editorial (http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/generic/story_generic.jsp?channel=awst&id=news/awst/2010/12/13/AW_12_13_2010_p58-275593.xml&headline=Editorial:%20Justice,%20Safety%20Require%20Balance) , let's look at another one:

At no point in this string of events did anyone knowingly do something wrong or shirk his or her responsibilities.

So the licensed mechanic, knowingly bodging the repair with the wrong material and the wrong fasteners, did not "knowingly do something wrong or shirk his or her responsibilities"?

There is a reason why a certain material and fastening method was specified. If he didn't know the reason he shouldn't have been licensed; if he did know the reason he "knowingly did something wrong or shirked his or her responsibilities".

And, to be clear, the reason can be deduced: the correct material and method had been tested and approved; all others had either not been tested and approved, or had been tested and found wanting. Ergo, using incorrect methods and materials may cause harm.

One could argue that titanium and stainless steel were functionally equivalent for the purpose, and that stainless steel might have sliced Concorde's tyre in the same way that Ti did. But there is no argument about the quality of the repair, or the fact of wrong fasteners being used, or of the poor workmanship, and that because of this poor workmanship the strip fell off the DC10 before it had even got airborne on its next flight.

[PBL]

I'll have to sign off here and avoid the lynch mob


I had rather thought you were playing the lynch mob, with an intolerance for detail, a point of view to pursue, an acknowledged lack of expertise, and a lack of interest in discussing in depth with experts whether your view is sustainable or not.

I am here to have fun, which means, for me, discussing matters of interest to me in depth with those whose expertise and knowledge exceeds mine, and helping to clarify things where mine exceeds that of others. I don't see the value of judging the entire history of a major airplane in a few laudatory, or in your case pejorative, words and then signing off. But I am happy to get back to interesting discussion.

PBL

[PBL]

Adding to Iron Duck's commentary on the phrase
At no point in this string of events did anyone knowingly do something wrong or shirk his or her responsibilities

That seems like a straightforward comment, but I notice it hides a lot which is relevant to these legal events. First, I note that this can be separated into two assertions:

1. At no point in this string of events did anyone knowingly do something wrong

2. At no point in this string of events did anyone shirk his or her responsibilities

ad 1. The French court disagreed with this assessment. They decided that the mechanic had committed involuntary manslaughter. I don't know what the French criteria for this are. In Britain, as far as I understand British law (and I am not a professional), one major criterion for having committed a criminal act which led to unlawful killing is having indulged in "gross negligence". There is negligence, and there is gross negligence. "Knowing" plays, if at all, a subsidiary role. Exercising one's duty of care, or not, plays a major role, as I understand it.

ad 2. I think it is obvious, as it appears does Iron Duck, that the Continental mechanic did not exercise his duty of care to perform the repair according to applicable procedure. If "not exercising his duty of care" is what is meant here by "shirking his or her responsibilities", then this second statement is false. And if it doesn't mean that, then I don't know what it would mean.

I am no expert in whether not exercising one's duty of care in this case constitutes "negligence" or "gross negligence", but these concepts are not necessarily applicable in French law. As for French law, the decision is before us and the quoted statement above just contradicts it. That is easy to do from another country and another legal system.

Edit: Just to make clear my position, I re-engaged with PPRuNe in Spring 2007, because of my concern with the increasing criminalisation of transport accidents, in order to try to contact people involved with investigating the ATC side of the GOL-Legacy collision. I think, along with a majority of aerospace professionals and professional societies, that the increasing criminalisation is a trend about which to be very concerned, not just as a question of justice but also in its oft-demonstrated conflict with thorough procedures in accident investigation. I think the public interest is ultimately best served by thoroughly investigating complex accidents as to cause, and this is hindered by criminal investigations in known and well-reported ways. However, I do not think the public interest is in any way well served by ignoring legal matters, not only the matter of determining compensation but also the matter of criminal proceedings in the case of possibly-criminal action. I think we need to work to reconcile the concerns in a way which appropriately acknowledges the public interest in all these aspects. This won't happen through aviation professionals reactively denigrating legal proceedings in each instance, and it won't happen through legal professionals asserting their right to do what they do independent of broader concerns of the polity.

PBL

[M2dude]

mike-wsm
Leaving so soon? Not disputing what you told us all here, but:
I think I can recall seeing G-BOAG nearing completion.
G-BOAG was NEVER in the Brabazon hangar under that registration, she was G-BFKW. She was re-registered to G-BOAG at Heathrow, after BA decided too keep her following a loan in the early 1980s (This loan was due to G-BOAC being returned to Fliton for wing repairs following a serious overheat).
Of the last two British aircraft, only G-BOAF resided at Filton under that registration, although only briefly following her acquisition by BA. Before that she was G-BFKX
What a crying shame it was that, after securing the block of letters G-BOAA to G-BOAG, the airline changed its name.
What total bilge; British Airways is a perfectly good name thank you very much.
As far as the lynch mob goes, if you'd only posted your points in a sensible and non-inflamitory manner (not to mention have interjected some facts now and then) you would I'm sure been a welcome contributer. The mob was of your own making sir.

Regards Dude :O

[Iron Duck]

It fascinates me to look back on our past 'successes' and to see what white elephants they were in real terms when compared with those very few real success stories, where aircraft are produced in greater than 1000-off quantities. One of the key elements is humility, the ability to accept reality and adapt to it. The British national character is one of arrogance and an arrogant political system driving arrogant company management will never yield commercial success.

Several facts of post-war commercial aviation seem to be generally ignored. I wonder why?

1. The WW2 deal was that the USA would concentrate on transports whilst the UK produced combat aircraft. Whatever the final outcome of that war, several consequences were easily foreseeable:

a) that win or lose, the UK would be severely damaged and lose its empire, and with it its potential transport aircraft export market;
b) that Europe would also be severely damaged, and other European countries' empires would also collapse, and with them, potential European-made transport aircraft export markets;
c) that if the Nazis lost, the European aviation industries would remain fragmented, relying on small domestic markets;
d) that if the Nazis won, then all of Europe would be a domestic market for German transport aircraft, not American
e) but notwithstanding any of the above, a large and expanding domestic US market for US-built transports could be guaranteed.

So a move that appeared entirely sensible and plausible at the time, namely that the UK should concentrate on developing weapons to fight with, was always going to result in the postwar dominance of US transport aircraft.

2. The USA is the only major country not to have had a state-owned National Airline. Evan Pan-Am, the so-called "chosen instrument" of the State Department, was privately owned. Consequently, US airlines have been largely free to pursue purely commercial objectives, and US manufacturers to satisfy those airlines' equipment requirements.

3. The USA is the only Western country that has a domestic aircraft market large enough to sustain the profitable production of 1000+ of a type. The classic postwar US airliners would have sold in profitable numbers without a single foreign sale.

4. Why do nations have subsidised, state-owned national airlines? In order to carry out their Governments' political wishes. As we can see over and again, those political wishes very often conflicted with "business efficiency" as they resulted in those airlines having to operate unprofitable routes and, often, non-US equipment for political purposes. So it was that the VC-10, specified to operate UK "empire routes" and to operate from short and unimproved runways, was always likely to have higher seat-mile costs than the 707.

If Vickers hadn't had to comply with these requirements, would they have designed the VC-10 as they did? And was there ever going to be a 1000+ market for it in the post-war Marshall Plan world, in which the USA was making quite sure that Britain took its post-imperial "rightful place" in the global power structure? The USA's entry into WW2 was its bid for global domination. The Marshall Plan was the outcome. The USA always plays to win.

5. All of the successful postwar non-US types have been commercially successful because they were the first in their fields with no US-made equivalent and offered very significant performance improvements, operating cost reduction and passenger appeal when compared to existing US types: the Viscount, the Caravelle, the BAC 1-11. All achieved US sales. Even the Britannia did. The Comet and Concorde might well have joined this roster had events not turned against them. No other post-war non-US type ever stood a chance, commercially.

Edit: I should add the Fokker F27 to this list of successful non-US types, of course. As the first pressurised turboprop "DC-3 replacement" it was commercially successful for the same reasons that the others in this list were.

So were they white elephants? No. They carried out a strategic political function in maintaining the non-US aviation industrial base that gave rise to Airbus, a multinational consortium that eventually could command a potential non-US market to the extent that it could achieve 1000+ sales without needing sales to the USA, and thereby finally matching the potential of the US domestic market.

And, famously, passengers much preferred the Iron Duck to the 707. BOAC flew it more profitably on the North Atlantic than the 707.

Edit: The Iron Duck is, of course, the Vickers VC-10.

[Golf-Sierra]

Hello,

I was wondering just how common is it for various parts fall off planes? Understandobly this is vary likely in the event of a tail, wing, engine strike - usually (hopefully) the pilots would report this to ATC and someone would check that no debris is left before the next plane uses the runway.

Birdstrike can also lead to pieces falling off - but would the crew always be aware that a birstrike had occured? - Doubt it. Finally we have bits coming off of their own accord - well - unless it's something significant i.e. an engine or stabiliser - probably won't be noticed until someone inspects the runway?

So how often are various metal pieces of various sizes found on runways? Does this happen sufficiently often so that engineers and regulators should take them into account when designing and certifying aircraft? Planes are designed to handle birdstrikes - as these are likely to occur. Unlike trains however, they are not desgined to survive cow strikes ;-)

Did the designers of Concorde ever brainstorm what could possibly lead to a tyre failure? Were they able to draw on the experience gained from other types showing how failure of a cut tyre differs from that of an underinflated one?


Regards,

Golf-Sierra

[PBL]

Did the designers of Concorde ever brainstorm what could possibly lead to a tyre failure? Were they able to draw on the experience gained from other types showing how failure of a cut tyre differs from that of an underinflated one?


Yes, and yes.

More details were given by M2Dude just a few posts back. Would you care to read his contribution?

PBL

[SLFinAZ]

The underlying issue here is the flawed presumptions...

A decision was made that the worst case scenario specific to a tire failure might result in a significant fuel leak (DC) but would not reach an order of magnitude capable of a catastrophic loss of the airplane. The simple fact is that this determination was wrong.

A prudent and reasonable person faced with the reality that tire failure would with certainty lead to ruptured fuel tanks and the resultant fuel leaks would look for a method to protect against the leaks.

The most significant underlying fact is that the technology existed to minimize the danger of a fuel leak specific to damage caused by tire failure. The issue here is not the cause of a specific failure but the stark reality that the airline chose not to maximize the safety of the aircraft for purely economic reasons by relying on a flawed analysis of the possibilities of catastrophic failure.

Air France had a legal and moral responsibility to operate the aircraft taking all reasonable measures to protect its customers. I have zero doubt that a jury presented with the facts available would find AF guilty of failing to act in a prudent and reasonable manner.

[PBL]

Speaking of flawed presumptions -

I have zero doubt that a jury presented with the facts available would find AF guilty of failing to act in a prudent and reasonable manner.

I have considerable doubt. Mainly for the reason that, as far as I know in French law, as well as a number of other jurisdictions, "failing to act in a prudent and reasonable manner" is not a criminal offence.

Whatever the criminal offence may be of which you are trying to accuse Air France, if it is based on a claim (what you call "stark reality") that

the airline chose not to maximize the safety of the aircraft for purely economic reasons by relying on a flawed analysis of the possibilities of catastrophic failure.


then I think a competente defence lawyer would shred it in a few minutes, by challenging you to provide any evidence that it was true, thus forcing your reply that you don't have any.

PBL

[infrequentflyer789]

The underlying issue here is the flawed presumptions...

A decision was made that the worst case scenario specific to a tire failure might result in a significant fuel leak (DC) but would not reach an order of magnitude capable of a catastrophic loss of the airplane. The simple fact is that this determination was wrong.


No, the determination would have been that it was "Extremely improbable". The fact that it happened, once, doesn't necessarily disprove that.

However, since the way that it happened was through a damage mechanism not well known (if at all) in the civilian world, it is likely that, yes, the determination was wrong. It was, however, wrong due to the existence of an unknown phenomenon, not to to negligence or incompetence in making the determination.


A prudent and reasonable person faced with the reality that tire failure would with certainty lead to ruptured fuel tanks and the resultant fuel leaks would look for a method to protect against the leaks.


Tire failure does not lead to ruptured fuel tanks with anything like "certainty". Not even on Concorde.

Substitute "turbine disc failure" and now we're talking - maybe better that 30% probability of tank penetration, by hot fast moving deris, and subsequent fuel leak.

So, yourself being prudent and reasonable, which types do you fly on that have fuel tanks that are protected against leaks due to turbine disc impact ? I'd love to know what it's made of and how it gets off the ground.


The most significant underlying fact is that the technology existed to minimize the danger of a fuel leak specific to damage caused by tire failure.


The tires did not in fact exist - and they are the biggest improvement. The tank lining technology did not exist when the a/c was built and certified, and some reckon it has little benefit anyway.

Other a/c are now fitted with the new tire tech. Not so the tank linings.

Surely it would be "prudent and reasonable" to fit both to all types - so why not ? [clue: economics]. Are all operators as guilty as you think AF is ?


The issue here is not the cause of a specific failure but the stark reality that the airline chose not to maximize the safety of the aircraft for purely economic reasons by relying on a flawed analysis of the possibilities of catastrophic failure.


Aircraft safety is never maximised, there is always more that could be done, and that is for economic reasons. Adding stuff adds weight, reduces number of pax - economics.


Air France had a legal and moral responsibility to operate the aircraft taking all reasonable measures to protect its customers. I have zero doubt that a jury presented with the facts available would find AF guilty of failing to act in a prudent and reasonable manner.

AF have responsibility to operate the a/c according to its certification & other operational regs. They are not responsible for its certification.

AF (if they were involved in the risk calculations at all) evaluated the previous tire burst incidents, took remedial action based on the calculated risk based on what was known at the time. They were caught out by a freak accident and an unknown (to them) phenomenon.

If anyone's to blame for the risk calculation, blame the military guys for not disseminating knowledge of hydrodynamic ram.

[green granite]

The "flawed presumptions" are really only flawed with the benefit of hindsight, probably the vast majority of aircraft accidents would have been avoided if hindsight could have been applied before they happened. I suspect that almost everyone here has had something go wrong which, with hindsight, they could have avoided even if it was just burnt toast.

[bearfoil]

I like the US way, call me parochial.

".......The purpose is not to assign fault........."

bear

[Iron Duck]

I like the US way, call me parochial.

".......The purpose is not to assign fault........."

I don't think anyone here disputes that, per se: I think we all deplore the fact that in France it is necessary to hold a criminal trial to assign responsibility for damages and compensation, and that the threat of such a trial has a chilling effect on impartial accident investigation. We all wish that France had an inquest system.

But what is inescapable is that the accident happened in France, and as a consequence the investigation and subsequent actions are within and subject to French legal jurisdiction. Opinions ventured from the point of view of other legal jurisdictions are entirely irrelevant.

Edit: I should add, that includes opinions from a UK legal perspective. We have inquests and Coroner's Courts here. They're useful.

[SLFinAZ]

I am discussing civil not criminal liability here. however there is substantial case law specific to consumer safety where criminal sanctions were imposed for less serious breach of judgement.

IMO both a civil and criminal jury would view the motivation not to modify the fuel tanks as financially driven. Further they would view this decision as imprudent based on the statistical certainty of a fuel leak. The argument presented by the plaintiff/prosecution is the simple concept that given the statistical certainty of a fuel leak it is impossible to reach a conclusion that such a leak of unknown magnitude can be considered 100% safe.

Since a fire (however unlikely) is highly likely to cause a catastrophic event and loss of life a prudent person would seek to minimize the chance of a leak occurring. Had no leak occurred there would be no fire and the other damage would be insufficient to cause hull loss and resultant loss of life.

So the root cause of the accident is not the FOD but the negligence of the operator in taking appropriate safe guards specific to the potential for a known catastrophic event.

At the end of the day this was a business decision gone wrong and both a civil verdict and a criminal verdict of negligent homicide would be proper.

[Iron Duck]

I am discussing civil not criminal liability here. however there is substantial case law specific to consumer safety where criminal sanctions were imposed for less serious breach of judgement.

Would that be French case law, perchance? And if not (see my post above), do you fancy canning it?

[PBL]

I am discussing civil not criminal liability here

You used the word "guilty". That is a concept of criminal law, not of civil law.

You now say you are concerned with "liability". That is a concept of civil, not of criminal law. But you speak of "criminal liability", which I think is an inapplicable concept.

If we are going to have a half-way serious discussion about these matters, which I think are very serious indeed, and worth discussing, as I think you do, then there has to be some common agreement about the use of technical terms, whether of law or of aviation, otherwise we are all going to end up talking past each other.

Concerning liability, I think infrequentflyer789 has just said it. The regulator says the aircraft is airworthy; therefore Air France may fly it. The airline relies on the regulator to perform airworthiness assessments; it has no in-house expertise on that. Serious concerns about airworthiness are the responsibility of the regulator. And the regulator was in fact in court, charged!

DGAC was found not guilty and assigned zero part of the responsibility by the court (that itself seems to me a mixing-up of criminal- with civil-law concepts; it seems French trials of this nature serve both purposes). Whether that is just is something which we could profitably discuss in this thread.

PBL

[SLFinAZ]

Both civil and criminal aspects come into play. In a perfect world the forum for litigation of either kind should not impact the result. As a general matter of law the operator of a commercial vehicle holds final responsibility and liability for its operation.

The Concorde was only operated by the two carriers. My understanding is that BA went ahead and modified its planes in order to minimize issues specific to tire failure. I am unaware of AF undertaking any such modifications. This is a clear indication that both operators were aware of the potential liabilities and one acted in a prudent and reasonable manner while the other failed to exercise prudent and reasonable judgement.

The prudent man standard completely refutes any attempt by AF to hide behind the arguments you make. The information was available to AF and given the availability of the information AF had a clear cut legal obligation to act in a prudent manner.

[SLFinAZ]

Iron Duck...

Based on my observations here "French law" (at least as it relates to this matter) is an oxymoron.

I have never seen a matter of this nature framed in such a narrow and imperfect manner. The entire proceedings as structured are/were clearly pointed at identifying a very specific cause and effect without delving into the decisions that led up to the incident. We have a statistical certainty of tire failure leading to damage and fuel tank ruptures yet the carrier completely ignored its responsibility to take every reasonable step to mitigate potential danger.

The real issue here is not what caused the blowout (given the statistical certainty of it) but why no attempt to safeguard the plane and passengers from catastrophic failure was undertaken.

[SLFinAZ]

Let me try and clarify a few things by reviewing a few of the variables here....

1) Was the problem with the spacer a known item that was MEL'd, a maintenance mistake that was not caught or a known problem not yet fixed?

2) My understanding is that the last information from the tower to the Concorde was an 8 knot tailwind...is this correct

3) The Concorde used the extended portion of the runway whose surface was not properly finished and very rough

4) An unknown amount of luggage was not properly logged for weight calculations

5) The plane based on documented weight at push off was over its max operating limit and relying on fuel burn during taxi to be legal at takeoff

[PAXToronto]

SLFinaz, why don't you go read the accident report. All the crap you spew in the above post was either proven to be false or irrelevant to the accident.

As someone with no professional connection to the airline industry at all I refrain from posting here, it is simply an interest. But after reading the same drivel again and again eventually I had to speak up.

I swear that the Concorde accident and Sept 11 bring out the lowest common denominator in people.

[wings folded]

Based on my observations here "French law" (at least as it relates to this matter) is an oxymoron.



And is that a helpful contribution to a debate about a horrible incident in aviation history?

And your observations about the cause of the accident do not appear to be based upon technical knowledge.

And your confusion of civil and criminal process reveals a total absence of knowledge in that arena too.

And your total ignorance on legal process not in your country shines brightly.

This thread has many differing points of view, some technical, some legal, some procedural.

I learn a lot from the technical debate, which may be a little late, but I learn nothing from your "IMO" remarks which bring neither technical knowledge, legal knowledge, nor knowledge of jurisprudence in different domains.

I have learned nothing from your contributions, in short.

[SLFinAZ]

I'm sorry but here are the simple realities based on the above...

1) The plane was improperly maintained
2) The flight engineer had improper information for computing max weight
3) The plane took off on a runway with a poorly prepared initial surface
4) The last information the pilot had from the tower indicated a tail wind

Simply looking at the actual flight involving the accident we have operational, procedural and cultural indications of negligence. This plane left the gate above max takeoff weight, taxied to a runway position that involved using a rough surface and had tires being subjected to extra stress due to the combination of extra weight, friction and lateral stress on a plane not suitably modified for maximum safety. Based on the best available information from the tower the pilot did not have proper conditions for take off.

My questions are simple....are the above facts incorrect or not. don't give me BS about french law and other trivia....

From everything I see you have a pattern of admissible evidence that points to a reckless disregard for standardized operating procedures, maintenance and flight safety that clearly points to professional negligence by all 3 elements of the organization. The question wasn't if a major accident would happen but when....

[Lemurian]

selfinaz,
1) The plane was improperly maintained
If you talk about the spacer, there was a fault there... which had not had any effect on the flight.
2) The flight engineer had improper information for computing max weight

Rubbish. Had you had any knowledge of AF procedures and read the report, you wouldn't write such an asinine claim.
3) The plane took off on a runway with a poorly prepared initial surface

Rubbish ! that runway at that time was like a billiard table.
4) The last information the pilot had from the tower indicated a tail wind

Yeah ! but during flight prep, we are kept au fait of the hour's conditions. We know the wind from both ends of the runway and we know the average. Only an armchair pilot would accept the tower wind without prior information.
... and had you had some - just some usable math, the recorded acceleration of that flight adheres to the fraction of a second to the values for a nil wind takeoff at a weight close to MTOW for the day's conditions.

What I find extraordinary is this persistent attack on Air France. After all, the accident came from a fallen piece of a Continental DC-10... piece that was so shoddily repaired TWICE I might add that the entire maintenance department of that airlin e is in dire need of some virile auditing.
As the report states : In fact, over a period of little more than a month, the part had been replaced during a C check, had become detached and twisted and had again been replaced, this time by a part which was not in accordance with the manufacturer’s specifications, this one being the one which fell off on 25 July 2000. Of course, this is not a critical part from the airworthiness perspective, but true safety implies strict respect for procedures, without any personal interpretation

In fact when you write...From everything I see you have a pattern of admissible evidence that points to a reckless disregard for standardized operating procedures...
I would heartily agree with you, but the blame comes from across the Atlantic, not from France.
Unfortunately, we're quite accustomed to that sort of supercilious attitude.
(finger)

[wiggy]

Did the flame propagate forward in the boundary layer in your fire? A fire started by the reheat flame would not benefit from any boundary layer effects in its attempt to 'catch up'.

Sorry for the delay. We'll never know...we had a fuel leak (F-4) which was then probably ignited by engine bay temps. We certainly had propogation forward ( wreckage analysis) and a 200 -300 foot long flame "attached" to the aircraft after one engine was stopcocked and the other was placed at idle.....

[Iron Duck]

Based on my observations here "French law" (at least as it relates to this matter) is an oxymoron.

But it exists, and is the law of that land. That you find it oxymoronic, or personally offensive to your sense of natural justice, or your knowledge of US justice, is irrelevant. From my UK perspective I might, too, but I don't go on about it because it is of no meaning.

Marshall Plan or no Marshall Plan, people in non-US countries continue do things differently to Americans. It may come as a surprise to you to discover that not all of the rest of the world wishes to be American; that non-Americans are often comfortable with their own cultural constructs; and that as far as they are concerned their laws and conventions are just, reasonable and appropriate. And that is not to say that their laws cannot be improved, but one has to engage with reality. French law, oxymoronic or not, holds sway in France, the legal jurisdiction in which Concorde crashed.

Simply looking at the actual flight involving the accident we have operational, procedural and cultural indications of negligence. This plane left the gate above max takeoff weight, taxied to a runway position that involved using a rough surface and had tires being subjected to extra stress due to the combination of extra weight, friction and lateral stress on a plane not suitably modified for maximum safety. Based on the best available information from the tower the pilot did not have proper conditions for take off.

And, according to the BEA report, none of that had the slightest influence whatsoever over the crash, which occurred as a result of Concorde rolling at high speed over a titanium strip dropped on the runway 5 minutes earlier by a departing DC10. An event that had never previously happened in 105 years of civil aviation.

I have to say, SLFinAZ, that you sound like a cracked recording of someone with their hands over their ears going "la la la la"...

[jcjeant]

Hi,

If you talk about the spacer, there was a fault there... which had not had any effect on the flight.This spacer problem is really a problem for me ...
which had not had any effect on the flight
Finally one may wonder why people who have developed the Concorde have foreseen this spacer as apparently it is a useless part .. actually .. who has just added weight ...... :8

[Iron Duck]

From everything I see you have a pattern of admissible evidence that points to a reckless disregard for standardized operating procedures, maintenance and flight safety that clearly points to professional negligence by all 3 elements of the organization. The question wasn't if a major accident would happen but when....

Quite possibly. But according to the BEA report, this wasn't it.

[PacWest]

The British national character is one of arrogance and an arrogant political system .......




`
After reading this whole thread. I couldn't agree with you more.

[wings folded]

My questions are simple....are the above facts incorrect or not. don't give me BS about french law and other trivia....



I wonder sometimes why I even read, let alone respond to such bigotry and ignorance as displayed by the Arizonian passenger.

But I read all contributions.

Does he regard American law as trivial?

Anyway, to move to a higher level, I hope, the Marshall Plan has been mentioned once or twice. I just wanted to mention that the headquarters of the Marshall Plan mechanism was in the Hotel de Talleyrand in Paris.

And what is the address of that building?

Well, Place de la Concorde...........

[infrequentflyer789]

Hi,
Finally one may wonder why people who have developed the Concorde have foreseen this spacer as apparently it is a useless part .. actually .. who has just added weight ...... :8

By that logic, everything you can MEL should be removed from the a/c to save weight, since you don't really need it. :ugh:

While we're at it, since a twin can fly on one engine, why bother having two ? I'm sure MOL could come up with a contraption to carry half a dozen pax on the spare pylon.

[Safety Concerns]

A whole bunch of aircraft have wheel spacers, nothing new there and they get forgotten, also nothing new there. Awkward and can cause small damage but more embarrassing than anything else.

As to the British character that's an interesting one. However a few facts; british aviation safety leaves France way behind not even smelling the dust because it has long settled before the french come into town.

Air France has a safety culture that shall we say, is a culture all to its itself.
Fact is you have more hull loses, more incidents. What are you trying to say?

And note what I am saying, culture. That is not necessarily talking about skill, intelligence, training etc. etc. It is making a statement about safety though.

[wings folded]

As you post consists of quotes from the Aviation Week editorial (http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/generic/story_generic.jsp?channel=awst&id=news/awst/2010/12/13/AW_12_13_2010_p58-275593.xml&headline=Editorial:%20Justice,%20Safety%20Require%20Balance) , let's look at another one:


I cannot quite grasp what importance anybody should want to attach to the personal views of the editor of an American magazine, when there are years of investigation by those with access to all data sources (amongst which, alas, the debris) months of hearings and months of deliberations resulting in a verdict which is readily available, clear and results from hearing evidence called by the Procureur and by the defence, not to mention the part played by the various "Parties Civiles" and their avocats.

[Iron Duck]

I cannot quite grasp what importance anybody should want to attach to the personal views of the editor of an American magazine

The magazine is widely read, respected, influential and opinion-forming. On reading the editorial the bulk of its readership is likely to form the opinion that a miscarraige of justice has occurred. I don't think that's helpful when a miscarriage of French justice, the applicable justice, has probably not occurred.

As PBL has pointed out (http://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/435870-french-concorde-crash-21.html#post6127171), the editorial's assertion that

At no point in this string of events did anyone knowingly do something wrong or shirk his or her responsibilities

...ignores the well-documented fact of the poor workmanship embodied in the faulty repair, which cause the titanium strip to be on the runway, that according to the BEA report led directly to the crash; and is thereby demonstrably false. The licensed mechanic not only used the wrong material and the wrong fastening method, but also made a poor job of the unauthorised fastening method he selected, which is why the strip fell off.

Given his training and licensed status it is inconceivable that he did not knowingly use the wrong material and fasteners and execute his work to a demonstrably inadequate standard. He knowingly did something wrong. And, as PBL says:
I think it is obvious, as it appears does Iron Duck, that the Continental mechanic did not exercise his duty of care to perform the repair according to applicable procedure. If "not exercising his duty of care" is what is meant here by "shirking his or her responsibilities", then this second statement is false. And if it doesn't mean that, then I don't know what it would mean.

Hence the Court's verdict.

One would expect better of such an editorial.

[Saint-Ex]

Selfinaz.

One could equally argue that the Continental aircraft was improperly maintained.

[wings folded]

Iron Duck,

You underline my point entirely.

The personal views of a journalist on an American magazine, within the editorial seem or a likely to be seen as the definitive word on the topic to many readers of the magazine.

More serious people interested in the case would read more widely.

They might read the BEA report, the hearing transcripts and the verdict.


One would expect better of such an editorial.


I disagree. The editorial is exactly what one would expect. The opinions expressed are entirely consistent with the views his readers already held. He sells magazines, mostly to Americans. They buy what they want to read.

The sanctimonious nonsense about no blame reporting is a puff of wind on a stormy day.


More to the point, the specter of fines and jail time will have a chilling effect on the voluntary reporting of errors and retaining and sharing safety-related information. Today, a no-fault approach is producing some of the most significant improvements in safety.

This journalist did not spot accurately that jail time demanded by the Procureur was suspended.
To an American mechanic wherever he is, this is a symbolic penalty. He would neither serve "prison ferme" nor whatever suspended sentence in any event.

He also sidesteps the regime in place in his jurisdiction, wherein civil liability needs to be established for determining the various insurance contributions to be made.

Elsewhere, it is done differently.

[Jorge_Vilarrubi]

Dear folks,
Not being a pilot at all, just an observer who is interested in technology and who loves flying, I dare to write some thoughts here:
Reading the Final Report of the Columbia Accident (CAIB (http://caib.nasa.gov/)) and this thread, it drives my attention the fact that I believe there are some common root causes in both disasters: excess confidence, procedures not adhered to, political decisions instead of technical ones, etc.
I know, the CAIB report is a very extensive one, but I think many of you have already read it.
I'd like very much to read the opinion of the many experts in this Forum.
With kind regards to you all,

[stepwilk]

Nobody seems to have made it through more than half of the AvWeek editorial. It's not so much about the specific accident as it is about the trend toward the criminalization of aircraft accidents.

[ChristiaanJ]

Nobody seems to have made it through more than half of the AvWeek editorial. It's not so much about the specific accident as it is about the trend toward the criminalization of aircraft accidents. I rather agree...
Nobody seems to have read down to even this...
"We bring this up not to shift blame from Continental to Air France, Aeroports de Paris or EADS (the successor to the Concorde’s developers) but to point out the futility of trying to assign blame at all."

[kappa]

In Post 411 Iron Duck correctly traced the development of aircraft building as related to commercial aviation in the aftermath of WW2. But I cannot let the bolded quote below stand unchallenged! The poster strays from aviation into global politics and the prejudices become apparent.

And was there ever going to be a 1000+ market for it in the post-war Marshall Plan world, in which the USA was making quite sure that Britain took its post-imperial "rightful place" in the global power structure? The USA's entry into WW2 was its bid for global domination. The Marshall Plan was the outcome. The USA always plays to win. I was a teenager and keen student of current events when WW2 broke out in Europe. Being from an extremely anglophile family, we followed the radio broadcasts from London during the Blitz as if it were happening in New York. There is no question that Roosevelt wanted to do more than Lend-Lease to assist Britain, but we were in no way prepared to go to war, either mentally nor materially. The ‘isolationists’ were in the majority and believed the two oceans, and Naval forces to match, was our security. It was only 22 years since we had ‘voluntarily’ joined the “war to end all wars”.

Had the Japanese not attacked Pearl Harbor and Hitler not declared war on us, I honestly believe all Europeans would have been learning Deutsch. Churchill was right in his acknowledged relief that he was then sure Britain would survive.

The statement, “The USA's entry into WW2 was its bid for global domination” is ludicrous. I’m not sure what the poster meant by the word “bid”, which is a voluntary act or an “attempt”. We entered WW2 involuntarily and the fact that we came out of it ‘globally dominant’ was due to the USA not being the scene of the battle. We were a country that had taxed and given of ourselves for what was required to win against two enemies across two oceans. But we were spared the destruction.

Again we asked nothing but the European land to bury our dead. But we stayed in Europe as part of the occupying forces and even to help rebuild the defeated enemy under the Marshall Plan.


Yes, the USA always “plays to win”. So tell me, what country doesn’t?

[PBL]

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 (http://aviation-safety.net/database/dblist.php?Type=102)).

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 (http://aviation-safety.net/database/dblist.php?Type=103)).

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 (http://aviation-safety.net/database/dblist.php?Type=104)).

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) (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V3V-4811R75-4N&_user=10&_coverDate=12%2F31%2F1986&_rdoc=2&_fmt=high&_orig=browse&_origin=browse&_zone=rslt_list_item&_srch=doc-info(%23toc%235740%231986%23999769996%23394903%23FLP%23displ ay%23Volume)&_cdi=5740&_sort=d&_docanchor=&_ct=2&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=73adc7492c939fb913d205debfaa30c2&searchtype=a).)

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

[Safety Concerns]

come on PBL, first of all a very interesting point and a bit of history, totally agree with your views, however......

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.

the design is one thing, the other is that a properly qualified and approved individual did not follow procedures and the consequence of his shoddy work brought on this discussion.

I have absolutely no problem at all with his sentence and actually consider him lucky.

Too many individuals link just culture and no blame together. Very simply put, a just culture is about analysing an event and learning from it. Many accidents are just that an accident and therefore should not be criminalized. Wanton disregard for approved procedures and repairs, you get what you deserve, aviation or any other industry.

[Mike7777777]

In overview, from the information within the public domain, the underlying issues behind the Concorde crash are familiar to those who design complex systems and investigate catastrophic failures of complex systems.

1) O&M (or equivalent) documentation states "x"
2) Operatives/users (including maintenance staff) do not comply with "x" for various reasons (cost, time, convenience, "we've always done it like this", "don't see why we need to do that" etc)
3) The complex system generally continues to perform without catastrophic failure for a time period, this can be perceived by operatives/users as validation for non-compliance to "x"
4) Catastrophic failure occurs
5) Subsequent investigation identifies that non-compliance to "x" was a primary factor leading to catastrophic failure
6) Responsibility and liability ("blame") is allocated
7) Reduction in risk occurs .. until the next catastrophic failure

Prime examples are Chernobyl, Piper Alpha, Deep Water Horizon (probably ..)

[PBL]

Safety Concerns,

I think there is a subtle point here. It is not just a matter of agreement or disagreement with a verdict.

About fourteen years ago, Jens Rasmussen wrote an article in which he introduced his Accimaps, which are causal graphs in which the factors are described broadly rather than in detail, and the factors are layered according to the "level" at which they operate: direct causal events; operational background; legal background; organisational factors; and so on. The ATSB currently uses Accimaps, for example in the Lockhardt River report. (They are like Why-Because Graphs, which are, though, more detailed and drawn somewhat more rigorously, but without the layering.). Rasmussen also introduced the phenomenon of "migration to the boundary" (MttB). People doing their jobs optimise the way they accomplish things, in order to achieve their immediate goals, until they come up against constraints (this is MttB). However, the optimisation criteria available or preferred by an individual worker (getting the perceived job done while, say, minimising effort and resources) are not necessarily the criteria to which the task was designed (say, overall safety measures designed in the light of external review of accidents and incidents). He suggested that MttB was by far the most common phenomenon involved in the accidents which they had been looking at (primarily for the Danish process industries, as I recall). Reference: Rasmussen, Risk Management in a Dynamic Society: A Modelling Problem, Safety Science 27(2/3):183-213, 1997.

So the phenomenon of a mechanic effecting a repair without quite the right material, using a material which he may well have thought was better, and which apparently his supervisor thought was OK, is a known phenomenon. Stuff like this is pervasive (MttB).

The question is then what should happen when such behavior contributes in a directly causal way, not just to an accident, but to a freak accident to an airplane with unusual TO constraints.

Compare. German laws of the road are written basically in order to apportion compensation when an accident occurs. That is indeed how the laws read: "This is to be done, and if this is not done, and an incident ensues, then the perpetrator carries x% of the responsibility/blame for the event" and that pays out directly in monetary terms. This is an odd system to those of us used to British or US road law. It means, for example, that you can ride the wrong way on a bicycle track, and if the police stop you, you are not guilty of any offence. After all, there has been no damage. However, there is a legal trick: the police are entitled to give you official advice on the traffic law, and this advice comes with a fee. It is called a "fee for warning".

Germany, for example, is well known as a place in which people get annoyed at you for travelling on the autobahn as slow as 130 kph, which is the maximum speed in France and well over the maximum speed in Britain. People really do travel at 180/200/well over 200 kph depending on the car (usually Mercedes, BMWs and Porsches travelling very fast). However, it is little known that if you are travelling over 130 kph and are involved in an accident, you automatically carry a proportion of the responsibility/blame depending on your speed.

I live in a village, on the outskirts of Bielefeld. There is a narrow main road which curves around the church mound. My road comes off it at right angles, and there are a dozen young kids and a dozen older, not very mobile people all living within about a 100m radius of this junction. A kindergarten, and the church hall, is about 200m up the road. Curves. Houses. Kids who play in the village square and around the road. Old people regularly crossing the road on what amounts to a blind curve (there is a mirror for one direction). There is nominally a 30kph speed limit, which is appropriate. And which is ignored. People regularly come by my house at 40-60 kph, despite that they must stop at the junction, where the road ends, in 50m.

There has not been an accident. The police won't set radar traps unless there is a "reason", meaning it has to be designated a hazardous area by the appropriate political group.

Somebody is going to be hurt, sometime, outside my front door.

So what is best to avoid accidents? The system we have at the moment, in which no responsibility/blame is attached unless there is a resulting accident, in which case the consequences come down heftily? Or a system in which everybody is held strictly to the appropriate speed limitation, which is regularly controlled?

I would suggest: the latter. Taylor may have been engaging in sloppy work, but I would guess he was also working to MttB. And the responsibility for setting the constraints against which MttB behavior strains lies with the company and the regulators. Holding Taylor responsible does not serve the longer-term interests of safety, because the accident was freak. Lessons learned should include a review of safety practices and the way in which a safety culture is promulgated in the concerned organisations, here Continental's maintenance procedures.

There are organisations in which individuals take personal responsibility for safety (and therefore for accidents), and which engage in safety-critical operations to a high level of reliability. They have been studied by Berkeley groups centered around the organisational sociologist Todd La Porte. Th results are that in these high-reliability organisations, the personal responsibility of the individual worker is reinforced by having each critical point in the operation observed and checked independently by three different people reporting along different lines of command. Commercial aviation maintenance organisations have one person, the supervisor, (supposedly) checking and then signing off. The limitations of this system are well-known; see for example the Lufthansa incident at Frankfurt in 2001 in which the captain's side stick was reverse-wired in roll and he almost scraped a wing when responding to a gust during TO: AG RVS - Computer-Related Incidents with Commercial Aircraft (http://www.rvs.uni-bielefeld.de/publications/compendium/incidents_and_accidents/A320-FRA.html)

Convicting Taylor focuses away from the lessons that accident investigators believe are there to be learned. I would argue that anything that focuses away from those is less than conducive to aviation safety. This is independent of whether one considers the conviction of Taylor to be "just" or not. It is a point about negative interference amongst processes for achieving socially-important goals: on the one hand, pervasive safety; on the other hand, individual responsibility for negligent action.

(BTW, I expressly disagree with Mike7777777's analogy of the Concorde accident with Chernobyl, Piper Alpha, and Deep Water Horizon. Those all involved multiple instances of direct mistakes, and pervasively poor safety practice. Whereas the only action that could remotely be called poor practice in the Concorde incident was Continental's repair, and even that involvement in the causal factors was arguably extremely improbable.)

PBL

[Mike7777777]

(BTW, I expressly disagree with Mike7777777's analogy of the Concorde accident with Chernobyl, Piper Alpha, and Deep Water Horizon. Those all involved multiple instances of direct mistakes, and pervasively poor safety practice. Whereas the only action that could remotely be called poor practice in the Concorde incident was Continental's repair.)
Question of degree, that is all. Simplistically, could the failure have been averted by adherence to documented procedures? I'm very aware that "by the book" has many critics, and where the hazard to others is minimal then let them get on with it, but the ramifications of catastrophic failure for complex systems can be substantial; the UK potentially faces an electricity generating capacity crisis 2015ish onwards, a primary factor being the failure to enlarge the civilian nuclear power programme, partially as a result of the Chernobyl incident (other factors also apply).

In my experience (working alongside TÜV), the Teutonic approach is very prescriptive with insufficient reference to risk analysis, particularly condition based maintenance, although this is changing.

AFAIK, the Deepwater investigation is continuing.

[Iron Duck]

Kappa

I said

The USA's entry into WW2 was its bid for global domination

WW2 was a historical singularity: an opportunity to recast the world's geopolitics. It was a complex situation and judgements of national self-interest were based on complex calculations and projections. Some of the factors in the USA's judgement are self-evident:

• The European countries and their empires were severely damaged and enervated;
• The USSR under Stalin was increasingly powerful and self-proclaimedly expansionist;
• Hitler, having entered a pact with Stalin, could not be trusted as a bulwark against Soviet expansionism;
• that if the USA limited its circle of influence to its own land area, the USSR was quite likely to dominate Europe and large parts of the rest of the world;
• that it was going to be necessary to revitalise the damaged non-Communist world in order to prevent Soviet domination, but in a way that was not likely to result in another warring outbreak between European nations;
• and that a consequence of this should be the transformation of the revitalised non-Communist world into a ready market for US products and services.

Many, many of the consequences of the USA's entry into WW2 were beneficial to the world in general and the US population and its leadership deserves our gratitude for that, not least for the US lives expended in the process.

Yes, the USA always “plays to win”. So tell me, what country doesn’t?

Having been forced into joining WW2 two and a half years after it started, it would have been grossly negligent of the US leadership not to have attempted to maximise the positive outcome for the USA in every conceivable way. Why else abandon isolationism? The USA has always regarded itself as a nation with a mission, a vision repeatedly reiterated in Pesidential utterances. I am quite sure that Roosevelt saw nothing wrong whatsoever with a vision of the world dominated by American political and economic principles; whereas the likely opposite, a world dominated by the USSR, was anathema to the USA.

So the USA played to win. It was not Roosevelt's intention to end up with a Superpower duopoly; Roosevelt had intended that American political and economic ideas and systems should dominate, under US leadership. France and the UK's acquisition of independent nuclear deterrents were, I'm sure, an unwelcome development for the USA.

There is nothing wrong whatsoever with playing to win. However, this single-mindedness seems to me to have been a relatively new political phenomenon, not previously evident before the war, and one that the old-fashioned Europeans appeared not to have had to the same extent. Previously, as with corporations jostling for market share in a mature market, it appears to me that the geopolitical "great games" were played largely with balance-of-power and containment in mind. Japanese domestic corporate behaviour remains characteristic of this (I have personal experience). We can see this new dynamic played out in a multitude of post-war arenas, one of which is civil aviation.

So WW2 represented a singular opportunity to recast the world's geopolitics before the postwar business-as-usual of political and economic balance-of-power and containment resumed. Of course the USA played to win, and winning meant a world dominated by American political and economic ideas.

I'm not a historian and don't wish to bore people further with these ramblings.

[Safety Concerns]

sorry PBL still disagree on this. Freak accident and irresponsible behaviour are two separate entities here.

If we accept what you are saying there is no point in licensing individuals, there is no point in accepting responsibility for what you do. The actual mechanics of the accident may have been freak but the route to it was not.

One is licensed which gives authority, responsibility and accountability. It is one's duty to repair in accordance with approved manuals. It is one's duty to say NO when its being done incorrectly. That is the whole point of responsibility.

If you then turn round and say, well life is hard you poor thing go home and forget it, we will be turning the clock backwards and not forward. The effect of charging the mechanic will wake up a few other individuals and improve safety.

A just culture with accountability is what we need, not a mollycoddle state.

[Shell Management]

Too many individuals link just culture and no blame together.

Very true and a fundamental misrepresentation spread by the unionised flight safety mafia.

Very simply put, a just culture is about analysing an event and learning from it.

AND holding people accountable when their performance is significantly below par.

In this case the concious deviations by Continetal staff are just that. It is crazy to compare their reckless actions in maintaining a small metal strip to the far more complex actions of certificating a unique supersonic transport aircraft.

[T-21]

The whole accident could have been avoided if the French airport authorities had conducted a proper runway check before the Concorde had departed. Why was a FOD check not carried out prior to take off ? rather than shift the blame to Continental Airlines. :confused:

[Safety Concerns]

are you serious?

It's like saying well sorry me honor, it snowed after I set off so how can I be responsible for running over the poor old lady. Some people need to get real.

The source of this accident is clearly an individual who chose to do something his way rather than the approved way. Even then he didn't so a particularly good job of it.

Remove that one single factor and we have nothing post about here.

[Mike7777777]

The source of this accident is clearly an individual who chose to do something his way rather than the approved way. From the info available, I suspect that - under UK law - Continental senior management would have been charged with manslaughter.

[Johnm]

Quote:
The source of this accident is clearly an individual who chose to do something his way rather than the approved way.

From the info available, I suspect that - under UK law - Continental senior management would have been charged with manslaughter.

I suspect not, a charge of corporate manslaughter takes a lot of justification and proof of wilful neglect of duty.

I also suspect that a BA Concorde would have survived the incident as they all had modified tyres with precisely this kind of risk in mind.

[Chu Chu]

Suppose someone has walked up to the Continental mechanic and told him that if he installed the wear strip incorrectly it might fall off. And just maybe it would fall off on a runway. And maybe the next airplane to take off would hit it. And maybe that next airplane would be one of a handful in the world that, as it would turn out, could suffer a fatal crash if a tire hit the metal strip. And if that happened, 10 years later he might be sentenced to a suspended jail term in a country he may never have visited. My guess he would have said "yeah, right" and gone on with the repair. And even if he had changed his ways, I think it would have been for fear of causing a crash, not of getting a suspended jail term.

Of course, it's important to deter unsafe practices, but it seems to me that a punishment that's less likely than winning the lottery isn't much of a deterrent. Supervise the mechanics better. Make the airlines accountable for ensuring that their airplanes arrive with all the bits of metal they left with. Do a forensic examination of every piece of FOD that ends up on a runway. I don't know if any of those are feasible, but they'd all be better deterrents than what happened here.

I'm not saying the French law or French court was right or wrong. Laws can serve as deterrents, but that's not the only reason they are passed. And presumably the French legal system wasn't established as an aviation safety system. But I think it's hard to justify the verdict on the grounds that it will improve aviation safety.

[wings folded]

One last attempt at explaining French judicial process, then I give up and leave ignorance, prejudice and parochialism to get on with it.
I will try to give parallel equivalences purely to aid a misty understanding. The parallels will of course not always coincide in the detail.
French law has three levels of procedure
1) "Tribunal de Police" concerned with mundane matters such as traffic offenses
2) "Tribunal Correctionnel", concerned with "delits" which may be thought of by British readers as "misdemeanours. I do not know if US readers have an equivalent in their multiple systems of law.
3) "Cour d' Assise" to try "crimes". No translation needed. The word is spelt the same in both languages.
We can forget 1) above; it has no relevance here.
Those against whom the process is applied are termed:
- in the case of 2), "prevenus" which translates as "forewarned"
- in the case of 3), "accusés", which of course translates as "accused"
Now, here is where you have to pay attention.
The procedure at Pontoise was "correctionnel", not criminal (or criminelle if you prefer).
So to all posters, using the inflammatory expression "criminalisation" or "criminalization", pleas note that had the intent of the procedure been to criminaliz(se) the interested parties, the forum would have been the Cour d'Assise, not the Tribunal Correctionnel.
French procedure was applied absolutely correctly.
Those who proclaim that we all in this debate regret the absence of an inquest system in French law do not speak for me. French law has perfectly workable systems in place to deal with this kind of tragic event.
The methods may appear different, and perhaps unfamiliar, but they are valid.
Just a footnote on the use of the word "blame".
As I read or hear the word, it has heavy connotations. I think it should not.
If I sneeze and deposit the product on somebody, I am to blame for soiling their jacket.
It was not a voluntary act.
If I do something in defiance of established law, rules, procedures or whatever, we will use the same term. "I am to blame" or "he is to blame"

[Mike7777777]

I suspect not, a charge of corporate manslaughter takes a lot of justification and proof of wilful neglect of duty.
My understanding is that the Continental corporate body has been found guilty of a form of manslaughter under French law, not certain how this would equate to a manslaughter charge of some form under UK law.
Are Continental's H&S management procedures with regards to maintenance and inspection activities in the public domain as a result of the court case? Would these be examined rigorously under French law?

[subsonicsubic]

The act of an individual....

I immediately thought you were referring to the PF in the Concorde.

But no. You are referring to the scapegoat...poor bugger.

Screw maintenance, bugger COG, Screw a tailwind etc etc.

[Safety Concerns]

the problem is subsonic everything you mention had nothing to do with bringing the aircraft down.

He isn't a poor bugger because he knowingly ignored approved procedures. Stupid maybe but poor bugger he ain't.

It is very simple:

bodgit repair
bit falls of
concorde catches it during take off roll
accident investigators prove link and cause

As to the French case and blame. You can use what terms you like but the fact is a sentence has been issued and rightly so for this tragedy.

[bearfoil]

wings folded

Hello. I can appreciate your concern with the word, "Blame". So it may be just a parochial exercise, this thread. My understanding of the word carries some unfortunate connotations, unsuitable for the Industry.

Blame, as generally utilized in our culture, means a 'focused' responsibility, such that an issue can be 'put to rest'. It unfortunately creates a mind set in the culture that suggests "finis". Similar to another word I detest, "Closure", it shuts down what can and should flow from a common recognition of evidence, cause, and 'rehabilitation'. Rehabilitation, in the sense of "corrective" measures is important to aviation.

So it may seem to some that a 'criminal' trial creates the aura of finality. If such is the case, perhaps mitigation of cause is left behind. Progress is left at the Courthouse steps, if you will. A civil proceeding is expected to focus on 'blame'; in this case the venue seeks to "make whole". This is about money, of course, a cause that can distract logic and reason in favor of a "Payday".

Here, there is no "running" of statutes re: Death, and Fraud. These "run" in perpetuity. To each his own, of course, and the hope remains that safety will always improve.

regards

bear

[DozyWannabe]

I'm a little loath to prolong the geopolitical history argument - as it is, at most, tangential to the discussion at hand - but I have to jump in here...


• The USSR under Stalin was increasingly powerful and self-proclaimedly expansionist;

Incorrect. See :

Socialism in One Country - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism_in_One_Country)

It was Trotsky who continued to push for global revolution. Stalin, if anything, backed off from that position - in real terms he was something of a Slavic nationalist who used the proto-totalitarian system in place in the USSR at the time for his own ends.

I don't think there was a strategist in the world who believed the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact would last once Hitler had achieved his ambitions in Western Europe, and so it came to be. I think both Hitler and Stalin themselves were well aware that the pact served only to buy a few years to resolve the struggles they were involved in at the present time, and that conflict was at some point inevitable - I'd go so far as to say that the only likely difference of opinion between Hitler and Stalin was who the victor would be when Nazi Germany inevitably attempted to expand eastwards.

I'd say that Roosevelt was remarkably prescient when it came to some things - he correctly ascertained that as long as the contemporary "Imperial" powers continued to squabble over resources, the result would be endless conflict, interspersed with short periods of fragile peace. The difference of opinion lies within whether Roosevelt the idealist genuinely believed he could achieve the end result of a United Nations organisation co-operating to resolve disputes between sovereign states, or whether he privately accepted that the Imperial powers should give way to US dominance over world politics once the war was over. The wild card turned out to be a vengeful Stalin sweeping across Eastern Europe to defeat Nazi Germany from the East and effectively demanding political dominance over the region as reparation, and so with Roosevelt dead and the more bullish Truman taking his place, what the world ended up with was the same "Great Game" - squabbles over resources and minor conflicts (prevented from escalating by the ever-present threat of nuclear global annihilation) - but with the major players being the USSR and the US as opposed to the old Imperial powers.

Ironically, it was the political descendents of the more conservative isolationists in the US that ended up using military power to promote US corporate interests in the last decades of the 20th Century.

Many, many of the consequences of the USA's entry into WW2 were beneficial to the world in general and the US population and its leadership deserves our gratitude for that, not least for the US lives expended in the process.

Now that I can agree with. However one of the things that bothered me so much about the way mainstream Western media presented the events of the Second World War in the latter half of the 20th century was the way that the efforts of the USSR on the Eastern Front were barely mentioned, except in the kind of in-depth books and documentaries that only those who were truly interested in the details would bother with.

In terms of aviation history there's a whole mountain of things to delve through to explain the postwar rivalries between Western countries and the US and UK in particular, stemming from a postwar treaty that dictated that civil aircraft would be primarily sourced from the US (which in 1945 found itself with a shedload of C-47s that were surplus to civil requirements), and for how long that treaty should be adhered to (an argument that rumbled on for decades). That's possibly for another time though, and belongs firmly in AH&N.

So, in an attempt to steer back on track, what we have to accept in this case is that the legal systems in Continental Europe work differently from the UK/US model. One of the first things my history teacher told us when we moved into modern history was that the legal systems on the Continent tended to work with a presumption of guilt, with the onus on the defendant to prove their innocence - which is in opposition to the UK/US model where the presumption is "innocent until proven guilty". This is the fundamental difference in approach from which all others are derived, along with characteristics peculiar to the state concerned - note that despite the Marshall Plan, the US did not demand that the French and (then) West German legal systems be redefined along Anglo/US lines.

Our cousin in Arizona posits that there are indisputable facts that could be pressed into an argument for negligence on the part of Air France. Nevertheless, all the evidence points to the fact that despite the missing spacer, the allegedly dubious weight calculations and the tailwind, Concorde F-BTSC would have made a successful takeoff with ample options for later fault correction had the tyre not been destroyed by the debris from the preceding DC-10, causing a failure of the fuel tank. The debris lay in F-BTSC's path because it was made of the incorrect material and shoddily fitted, and as such, the operator of the DC-10 and the mechanic concerned are considered primarily liable, with a smaller - though considerable - degree of liability placed at the door of EADS for not being strict enough in applying preventative measures in terms of fuel tank failure as the result of a tyre burst. Neither Continental's, nor EADS's lawyers were able to prove that their clients were not culpable with the evidence at hand.

That's the lie of the land at present, with Continental and EADS sharing corporate responsibility for the disaster. To me that in itself shreds any attempt to paint the result as "the French protecting their own" (paraphrased).

[jcjeant]

Hi,

So it may seem to some that a 'criminal' trial creates the aura of finality. If such is the case, perhaps mitigation of cause is left behind. Progress is left at the Courthouse steps, if you will.

The outcome of a trial in court of law can produce only one thing:
Judicial truth

[bearfoil]

Aye, the definition of "Judicial" is 'Opinion'.

Instead of focusing the admirable power of the Court to "punish", or even loosely "scapegoat", how more practical to use some of that power to forge a more broad administrative weight on the Regulators, operators, and owners.

Wishful

bear

[lomapaseo]

Safety Concerns

I gotta agree with you summary above:ok:

but for the ending I have a question

As to the French case and blame. You can use what terms you like but the fact is a sentence has been issued and rightly so for this tragedy.

for what purpose ?

certainly not to satsfy the future of safe flight

[Entaxei]

When the crash occurred, within the first two? days, I remember reading a newspaper report that the Cleaner responsible for clearing the runways of foreign objects, had not done so before the Concorde takeoff, as there was a union meeting in the canteen which he had gone to instead.

Has that ever been substantiated, I do appreciate that even if found to be true, it would have no bearing on any aspect of the investigation or subsequent blame, for reasons of national security. :E

[wings folded]

bearfoil

So it may seem to some that a 'criminal' trial creates the aura of finality.

I went to some lengths to explain that the trial was not "criminal".

Now, French procedure may be hard to grasp for those not familiar with it.

I have done my best to explain it in the context of this tragic case.

Justice is rarely in place for the purpose of assuring finality, if by finality one is thinking of the bereaved families of the victims, for example. Are people affected in some way better off by attributing cause to "X" or to "Y"?

It is awkward, nay some would say sordid, that in the ultimate, people, corporate bodies or agencies have to be found responsible for the causes of events such as this.

But that is the way that the compensation mechanism flows.

[Safety Concerns]

look, flight safety this flight safety that.

if you want people to adhere to procedures there must also be accountability. Genuine mistakes or errors are one thing and aptly covered by experts such as Reason and Dekker.

Going soft on downright foolhardy behaviour as in this case does not serve flight safety.

It is also easy: responsibility + accountability = high levels of safety
no responsibility + no accountability = bloody disaster

[DL-EDI]

Why was a FOD check not carried out prior to take off ?Why was a FOD check not carried out prior to take off ?

Is this based on the perpetuated myth that a runway inspection was required immediately preceding every Concorde departure, even before the accident?

And maybe that next airplane would be one of a handful in the world that, as it would turn out, could suffer a fatal crash if a tire hit the metal strip.

Are we sure there's no way such a titanium "blade" could possibly burst a tyre on another type in just such a particular way as to result in a 2m chunk hitting the underside of a wing at high speed and in just such a particular way as to cause a shock wave sufficient to burst a fuel tank from within? Or is this missing the fact that it was very different from previous incidents and has never happened before, to any type?

[MountainBear]

It is also easy: responsibility + accountability = high levels of safety

I wont argue with that as far as it goes. The problem is that it doesn't go very far. Because the question is not of what but of who.

Someone has tried to sidetrack the issue by arguing whether the case against the employee was civil or criminal. It doesn't matter from a safety perspective.

An employee by definition is an agent of his or her employer, unless the employee is doing something that has no connection whatsoever with their employment (and some would even debate that caveat).

If the agent commits a wrong the proper person to hold liable for that wrong is not the agent but the employer. It's the employer who holds controlling power over the duties of the agent and the terms and conditions of employment; that's the definition of being an agent and an employee.

As I said before I don't have a problem with holding legal corporation responsible. They chose to do business in France they play by French rules. No one forced them to do business there. But holding the employee in any way responsible for the obligation that properly rested on the employer is garbage. It's bunk. He is indeed a "poor bugger".

Worse, it doesn't promote safety. The agent's wrong did not occur in isolation from his superiors, his training, his education, and the scope and duties of his employment. Holding him accountable does nothing to prevent the next guy in the exact same situation from doing the exact same thing. Punishing or blaming the wrong person doesn't promote safety in the slightest. It's the opposite of accountability.

[Safety Concerns]

I'm sorry mountain bear your logic doesn't hold up.

The individual is licensed i.e. approved to standard. With that licence comes responsibility and accountability. If he was forced at gunpoint to do such a bad job then yes the company should also be accountable.

You are accountable for your actions and in fact EASA regulations are specific and I would imagine FAA as well:

(c) Any person or organisation performing maintenance shall be responsible for the tasks performed

Now you need to understand aviation regulations before going on about company agent nonsense.

An airline must make use of approved maintenance organisations, those maintenance organisations must employ licensed staff.

Licensed staff must ensure the work is performed to a standard before certifying for such. This is the basic ICAO format.

What you are advocating in your moment of madness is that nobody is responsible even when they have completely failed in their individual task. A task that the regulation says they are responsible for.

[MountainBear]

I think it is obvious, as it appears does Iron Duck, that the Continental mechanic did not exercise his duty of care to perform the repair according to applicable procedure.

He couldn't exercise his duty of care because he had no duty of care. The duty of care did not lie with the natural born person (the employee) but with the legal person (Continental). The company controlled the terms and conditions of his employment, they directed his activities, they hired him, etc.

That's why this ruling against the employee doesn't pass the smell test. It's 100% bunk. If the ruling is in accordance with French law and French case law then that law is bunk.

[Safety Concerns]

mountain bear, where did you get this nonsense. The care of duty comes with the licence and with following company procedures which would state, do it by the book.

what are you smoking?

in addition FAA regs state that:

(b) A certificated mechanic may not exercise the privileges of his certificate and rating unless he understands the current instructions of the manufacturer, and the maintenance manuals, for the specific operation concerned.

How anyone can justify no punishment here after 100+ innocent souls have perished amazes me. Complete dereliction of duty. Sorry buts that reality

[MountainBear]

The care of duty comes with the licence and with following company procedures which would state, do it by the book.

You haven't yet explained how holding the agent (the employee) responsible for the actions of the boss (the corporation) promotes safety. All you can do is keep insisting that somewhere, anywhere, in that black magic hat of yours that the individual employee has a duty to society that transcends his or her duty to their employer and that this social duty is severable from any action the employer makes. But your insistence doesn't make it correct. It just makes you stubborn.

[Safety Concerns]

I think you come from outside the aviation industry.

Aviation regulations are set up in tiers. Each tier acts as a further safeguard to prevent errors and omissions. An airline has a legal obligation to use an approved maintenance organisation. An approved maintenance organisation must supply approved tools, parts, manuals etc. in order to remain approved and in order for the qualified individuals to do their job. Part of whom are qualified "licensed" mechanics.

Licensed mechanics are required to follow the manuals and procedures as supplied by the employer, the approved maintenance organisation.

Now my response is based upon the following facts:

Continental are approved, supplied all the relevant data, supplied at least one qualified person and that person for whatever reason chose not to follow standard procedures.

If any of that is incorrect then you may have a splitting of the responsibility. You can't however just delete dereliction of duty by the person performing the job on some fanciful whim of a theory that just doesn't align with the regulations (law) in place.

Does not punishing drunk drivers aid road safety?

[PBL]

Ladies and Gentlemen,

the discussion has suddenly turned interesting, focusing on some real issues!

Safety Concerns,

I am not sure you understand the phenomenon of "migration to the boundary". Have you ever, ever driven a car one kph over a speed limit? One time? Two times? Most people I know do it often, of course where it's "safe" to do so, and then mainly because they don't notice. "Your honor, the defendant was going 1 kph too fast!" "Is that true, lad?" "I don't know, your honor" "OK, guilty. Because of the ensuing chain of events, 100 people died. Two years, suspended sentence!" Just? You may say so, I don't.

Do you have an argument that would persuade me, other than invoking your intuition?

Mountain Bear,

under UK law, every legal person has a duty of care. That goes for corporate "legal persons" as well as for real persons. In this case, the mechanic. Apparently under French law also. I would be very surprised to find that under (various state versions of) US law, there is no such duty. Suppose you are an auto worker on an assembly line, and you just don't bother to tighten the wheel bolts because you don't care, even though you are supposed to, and the test driver gets in the car and crashes it and injures herself. Are you really suggesting that US law doesn't prosecute the assembly line worker for not attending to his duty of care? I don't think you'll find that is the case at all.

PBL

[Mike7777777]

Possibly a geographical difference in H&S culture?

Under UK law, the duty of care would apply to everyone involved in the maintenance process, up to and including the CEO of the organisation responsible for undertaking the process and the "owner(s)" of the complex system(s) involved.

In a sentence, the enforcing authorities (eg HSE) line everyone up, the biggest fish is generally at the top of list.

[Safety Concerns]

PBL you are making the same assumption in your counter argument, the person wasn't aware of his indiscretion.

This one was. He knew what he was doing was wrong. You wouldn't dream of being so relaxed with a drunk driver who just killed a few kids and it wouldn't aid road safety by letting him off.

Now if somebody spiked his lemonade we may have a different discussion

[PBL]

PBL you are making the same assumption in your counter argument, the person wasn't aware of his indiscretion.

This one was. He knew what he was doing was wrong.

First point: are you sure the Continental mechanic was fully aware of his indiscretion? Or was he just trying to make an effective repair with what he took to be equivalent materials because the "regulation" one wasn't available? Do the court records decide these questions?

You wouldn't dream of being so relaxed with a drunk driver who just killed a few kids and it wouldn't aid road safety by letting him off.

Driving while drunk is very closely related, both by statistics and by overwhelming scientific evidence, to inability to judge situations and control the car, in a continuous manner. That is: you drunk, you not can judge, you no can control. That's how many of them are picked up.

Repairing a duct with titanium rather than with stainless steel is not so related. Witness the people on this thread who think that the effect would have been the same with stainless steel, and witness the extensive experimentation conducted by the BEA under contract to show that it wasn't the same.

Bad analogy. The mechanic could have judged that engendering an accident due to his choice was extremely improbable (in aerospace terms) and I dare say that had he done so he would have been right!

PBL

[Safety Concerns]

It wasn't just about the material it was about his whole irresponsible approach to the job.

Wrong material, wrong procedure, wrong method. How many wrongs do you need before we move well away from MTTB.

It is this false prophecy of no blame that is actually causing more problems than it solves.

Please don't become ridiculous now on drink driving. Everybody has a duty not to drink and drive long before the side effects of drink take a hold. You drink, you drive, you get caught, you deserve what you get.

You ignore procedures, you use wrong ,materials, you are sloppy, you cause an accident, you deserve what you get.

It serves no useful purpose particularly as far as flight safety is concerned to send out a message of no matter what you do you are not responsible.

It is irresponsible of those propagating such words because the effect on flight safety may well be the opposite to that intended.

Just culture is what we aim for. If there are sensible mitigating circumstances no problem at all with your comments.

However tonight in Paderborn, an aircraft will most likely be serviced. The person performing that work especially in these conditions should have a sense of responsibility and accountability about them as this helps to do the job properly. God help us if they went to work drunk or went to work with an I don't care attitude because I am not responsible anyway. MTTb is.

[PBL]

Please don't become ridiculous now on drink driving.


i am very rarely "ridiculous" (and when, then at home, not in public). if you think that, then that is a reasonable personal warning sign that you have misunderstood.


Everybody has a duty not to drink and drive long before the side effects of drink take a hold. You drink, you drive, you get caught, you deserve what you get.


Well, that is very current thinking. The thinking, say, fifty years ago was not nearly so absolute. It said that, if you could handle your car, then OK. If you couldn't, then <fill in the appropriate sentence>. Rather as the situation is for marijuana or other drugs nowadays. Now, I think that is both fair and just, but it turns out to be impractical in terms of deterring incapable driving under the influence of alcohol. Now, the law for drink says: more than x amount, you're <fill in the sentence appropriate to your blood-alcohol level>.

These things are mutable. Whereas I don't think that the likelihood of engendering a fatal accident if one substitutes titanium for stainless steel in an engine-duct repair is so mutable. I rather doubt that anything about stainless steel versus titanium renders the practice of substituting the latter for the former impractical in any sense which affects aviation safety very much.


It serves no useful purpose particularly as far as flight safety is concerned to send out a message of no matter what you do you are not responsible.


I agree. And I don't see anyone here arguing for that, except perhaps Mountain Bear (but I imagine he may change his mind).

PBL

[Safety Concerns]

I rather doubt that anything about stainless steel versus titanium renders the practice of substituting the latter for the former impractical in any sense which affects aviation safety very much.

but it wasn't just the material. Had he attached the titanium strip in a manner even closely resembling the approved repair, even the titanium may have just remained in place. At least for a little longer and this would never have happened.

The point is not hanging someone for one genuine mistake but here we have a catalogue of conscious decisions that even with the best will in the world cannot be easily ignored or attributed to mttb.

[MountainBear]

I would be very surprised to find that under (various state versions of) US law, there is no such duty.How does it feel to be surprised this morning? Hopefully it's a good feeling.

Under US theories of tort liability an employee is only liable for his or her own actions (as opposed to the employer) under two conditions. The first condition is when he or she is acting outside "the scope of his employment". This is a very narrow exception because courts have ruled that even driving drunk while on the job is the employers responsibility not the employees'. The other exception is if the activity is otherwise innately criminal, such as an employee who rapes a client. Those are the only two exceptions.

From an American point of view this case is an easy, cut and dried case. Was he acting within the scope of his employment? Obviously, he was an airline mechanic and he was fixing an airplane. Was his action otherwise innately criminal? Nope, nothing illegal about fixing a plane incorrectly. He would not have been punished in the USA.


You might want to read up on the legal aspects of this case: Valujet 592.

ValuJet Flight 592 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ValuJet_Flight_592)

Notice that not a single natural born person was convicted of a crime. But the company was criminally charged and convicted. That's the way we do it here. And I'd argue that it's philosophically the best way to do thing, chest thumping aside.

[MountainBear]

It serves no useful purpose particularly as far as flight safety is concerned to send out a message of no matter what you do you are not responsible.

Agreed. That's not the point of our disagreement, however.

Where we disagree is who is to blame. You want to blame the natural born person (the mechanic) and I want to blame the legal person (the company). As near as I can tell that is the only substantive difference between us.

In conformance with hundreds of years of case law on the subject, the company is the best person to hold liable because the company is the one in a position of power. It sets the terms and conditions of employment of the employee; it hires and fires; it manages the employee.

To me what you seem to want is the old guild system back where the employee is honor bound by his family traditions to do a good job. What rubbish. Come into the 21st century.

[JFZ90]

Agreed. That's not the point of our disagreement, however.

Where we disagree is who is to blame. You want to blame the natural born person (the mechanic) and I want to blame the legal person (the company). As near as I can tell that is the only substantive difference between us.

In conformance with hundreds of years of case law on the subject, the company is the best person to hold liable because the company is the one in a position of power. It sets the terms and conditions of employment of the employee; it hires and fires; it manages the employee.

To me what you seem to want is the old guild system back where the employee is honor bound by his family traditions to do a good job. What rubbish. Come into the 21st century.

If I understand you right you're saying:

1. in the US you can only really hold the company to account, not an individual employee
2. this is a good thing

I would have thought it best to be able to hold both to account for their actions.

As it stands you're saying a licensed US airline mechanic can do something completely negligent, hence be directly responsible for the loss of 100s of lives and the worst that could happen is that he might loose his job? (I'm talking hypothetically here about an aircraft loss directly attributable to maintenance negligence, not about the concorde/Ti strip incident)

[Safety Concerns]

sorry mountain bear I disagree

The only reason you want the company liable is to extract more dollars even if the situation actually results in more deaths.

Therefore there is a fundamental difference between us. I am seeking the best method of preventing future accidents you are seeking the best way to screw more dollars and whether an event takes place or not is largely irrelevant.

A company is not best placed as it rarely understands the complicated daily business going on around it. This is left to the employee to deal with. Therefore my opinion remains shared responsibility and aligns with the regulations I quoted.

Companies have responsibilities, individuals have responsibilities. To suggest a company is responsible for the actions of an individual who knowingly and irresponsibly ignored approved procedures is nonsense.

[PBL]

MountainBear,

I would be very surprised to find that under (various state versions of) US law, there is no such duty.
How does it feel to be surprised this morning? Hopefully it's a good feeling.

A rhetorically slick comment, but unnecessarily rude and also misleading.

I think you'll find that in many jurisdictions a general duty of care also extends to individuals. If A is employed by a security firm and carries a firearm when on the job, and he decides to show it off to a group of schoolkids taunting him, and he shoots one or two of them, then his employer may well have failed in its duty of care, but are you really suggesting that he walks off scot-free on the basis that he was in employment at the time of the incident? I doubt very much that he could. In many or most states, he would likely be prosecuted, and prosecutors would likely try to establish negligence (assuming no one believes the shooting was deliberate). Negligence is intimately bound with the concept of duty of care, for negligence is breach of that duty.

See, for example, the definition of "criminally negligent homicide" in Tennessee law, at T.P.I. -- CRIM. 7.07 (http://www.tncrimlaw.com/TPI_Crim/07_07.htm)
Note in particular the words "standard of care" in: failure to perceive it constitutes a gross deviation from the standard of care that an ordinary person would exercise under all the circumstances

Safety Concerns,

To suggest a company is responsible for the actions of an individual who knowingly and irresponsibly ignored approved procedures is nonsense.

Far from being nonsense, it is, as MountainBear pointed out, part of the law in most or all US states. A company is liable for the actions of any of its employees acting generally within the remit of their employment. Indeed, if you search for "duty of care" in US law documents on-line, these are the majority of instances you will find.

wings folded,

I am not sure what point you are trying to make by distinguishing a "tribunal correctionnel" from a "cour d'assise". Apparently, this tribunal correctionnel was able to hand down criminal sentences as well as apportion responsibility, and I think that discussion here is concerned mostly with a distinction between criminal act, whereby one is set some kind of punitive sentence for committing the act (often fine or prison), and civil liability, which is concerned mostly with financial compensation to victims for the consequences of an act. The distinction is clear and valid. One person was indeed handed a punitive sentence, in other words was judged guilty of a criminal offence. And it is the appropriateness of that in the context of larger concerns about improving aviation safety with which much of the discussion is concerned.

PBL

[jcjeant]

Hi,

I am not sure what point you are trying to make by distinguishing a "tribunal correctionnel" from a "cour d'assise"Tribunal Correctionnel apply for trial of a crime with no premeditation or no intention to kill.
If it's premeditation (intention to kill ) this will be a "Cour d'Assise"
It's also a big difference .. as in "Tribunal Correctionnel" the verdict come from the judges .. and in a "Cour d'Assise" the verdict come from a panel (jury) of ordinary peoples assisted by a judge.
Their verdict must be argumented (new european law - Strasburg court)
Also the penalties are completely differents (agravated penalties possible in a Cour d'Assise" to the death penalty .. changed in life time in jail)
The "Juge d'Instruction" play in this game !
AFAIK :)

[Lemurian]

I am not sure what point you are trying to make by distinguishing a "tribunal correctionnel" from a "cour d'assise".
I think I might add some more clarifications in this debate :
First of all I understand why all French readers of this forum are quite incensed, and that shock comes from one very meaningful difference between legal concepts between France and - apparently - most of Anglo-saxon countries : one cannot translate *crimes* into French as it is only reserved for very serious felonies especially murder or high treason
The Continental engineer, and the airline, were tried for a *delit*, roughly translated as *law infringement* or at the most *misdemeanour*.
As already said, the French system works on an accepted responsibility for individuals as far as their knowledge of the law and the penal risks they incur if they breach it.
Without that collective agreement on a citizen's responsibility, there is no French law... Generally, at the higher courts, the lawyers' job will be to find ways of mitigating/reducing that responsibility in order to lessen the verdict.
That's the reasoning behind the sentence : Mr Taylor was a licensed *engineer* ( another bad translation from the French is *mechanic* for *mecanicien* ), with qualification papers to prove his professionalism and as an employee of Continental, he must have been au fait of the airline maintenance procedures and standards. He failed to comply to either of these responsibilities...and pays the consequences, i.e not a lot as the consequences being a small fine and a suspended jail sentence.

The same fine would have been slapped on any engineer caught doing the same shortcuts in his works by an official audit, regardless of the possible consequences.

Apparently, this tribunal correctionnel was able to hand down criminal sentences as well as apportion responsibility
As said above, it's quite obvious but one has to know that the maximum anybody risks getting in a verdict by the *Tribunal Correctionnel* is 10 years of imprisonment.
On the other hand, the usefulness of that court is to aportion responsibilities - and blame, whether we like it or not - as to the likely compensation claims from the victims' entourage.
After this verdict - provided it is upheld in the appellate court - the claimants can only turn for compensation, to the parties that have been judged responsible for the accident... and no one else.

I think that discussion here is concerned mostly with a distinction between criminal act, whereby one is set some kind of punitive sentence for committing the act (often fine or prison), and civil liability, which is concerned mostly with financial compensation to victims for the consequences of an act.
These two concepts derive from the same court verdict and one would be very wrong to separate them, unlike the so-called O.J Simpson case which gave us a glimpse of the US system, in which one could be criminally innocent in one court but legally guilty in another, which strikes us as a rather quaint system, only good to get rich lawyers richer and to maximize some rather scandalous financial claims.
Remember living in the glass house and the stone ?

[wings folded]

PBL


Originally Posted by Safety Concerns
To suggest a company is responsible for the actions of an individual who knowingly and irresponsibly ignored approved procedures is nonsense.

Far from being nonsense, it is, as MountainBear pointed out, part of the law in most or all US states. A company is liable for the actions of any of its employees acting generally within the remit of their employment. Indeed, if you search for "duty of care" in US law documents on-line, these are the majority of instances you will find.


The fact that it may be part of the law in most US states does not ipso facto make it necessarily correct.

It is no more than a statement of how a particluar jurisdictions deals with this kind of issue.


wings folded,
I am not sure what point you are trying to make by distinguishing a "tribunal correctionnel" from a "cour d'assise". Apparently, this tribunal correctionnel was able to hand down criminal sentences as well as apportion responsibility, and I think that discussion here is concerned mostly with a distinction between criminal act, whereby one is set some kind of punitive sentence for committing the act (often fine or prison), and civil liability, which is concerned mostly with financial compensation to victims for the consequences of an act. The distinction is clear and valid. One person was indeed handed a punitive sentence, in other words was judged guilty of a criminal offence. And it is the appropriateness of that in the context of larger concerns about improving aviation safety with which much of the discussion is concerned.
PBL



I had two intents in mind.

One was to try to give a little insight into non US procedures (i.e. French in this instance) for those not familiar with them, and

second: to draw the distinction between a "Cour d'Assise" verdict which involves crimes, and a correctionnel verdict which involves "Délits".

The Continental mechanic was found to have committed a "délit", not a "crime".

The charge was "involontary homicide" (I have written on this before, but it may be worth repeating).

Now, what does that mean? It does not mean that he thought "I know what I will do, I will go completely outside the technical manuals, and pop a piece of totally unsuitable metal on an engine, that way Concorde will crash". Of course not.

It does mean that a correlation was found between his work and the final outcome, and that his work was identified as being well outside of what the protocols in place required.

He intended no harm, we can all suppose, but carried out a repair job incorrectly.

He was judged responsible for that by the court in Pontoise, and was given the sentence which had been demanded by the Procureur (Public Prosecutor if you wish), which was a suspended prison sentence. Note carefully that French justice is not vindictive, chauvinistic, anti American, or whatever.
A suspended prison sentence on an American national means what in concrete terms? He would be barred from standing for election as Mayor of a French town. He would anyway, unless he was French.
And that is about as far as it goes.


One person was indeed handed a punitive sentence, in other words was judged guilty of a criminal offence.

More than one, actually. A French national furthermore. And was judged to have committed a "délit" also.


DGAC was found not guilty and assigned zero part of the responsibility by the court (that itself seems to me a mixing-up of criminal- with civil-law concepts; it seems French trials of this nature serve both purposes). Whether that is just is something which we could profitably discuss in this thread.


Part of my efforts in explaining the distiction between correctionnel and assise was precisely to try to assist comprehension, because you appear a little unclear:


I am not sure what point you are trying to make by distinguishing a "tribunal correctionnel" from a "cour d'assise".


When I read remarks along the lines of "kangaroo court" or "French law is an oxymoron" I make reasonable efforts to explain the process.

For those who believe that airline safety is enhanced by a "no blame culture", I choose not to be part of that wider debate, because it goes beyond my skill or competence.

I can see a clear case that if a pilot is aware that he inadvertently endangers his aircraft by some kind of action which the aircraft's systems permitted, and he in the aftermath "confesses", there may be a slight mod necessary to prevent that from happening again, and I would prefer to sit a few rows back from that kind of pilot, than from the one who believes he is faultless.
I am not qualified flying crew, but I do know a little about that of which I speak.

[noske]

PBL,

Repairing a duct with titanium rather than with stainless steel is not so related. Witness the people on this thread who think that the effect would have been the same with stainless steel, and witness the extensive experimentation conducted by the BEA under contract to show that it wasn't the same. I think you misunderstood the BEA report regarding the significance of titanium vs. stainless steel. What I conclude from section 1.16.5 ("Tyre destruction mechanism", p. 97 in the English PDF version): For the low speed cutting tests they used one strip made of titanium, and some others made of "a stainless steel whose material strength characteristics are similar to titanium". For the high speed tests they used titanium only. But there is no hint that the low speed tests indicated a significant difference between the two materials. Yes, one strip was flattened instead of cutting into the tyre, but this was due to its positioning on the runway, and it happened to be the one made of titanium.

[PBL]

I thank you both, Lemurian and wings folded, for explaining some of the concepts of French law. Amongst other things, we do work for a French lawyer (maybe the very same one referred to by David Learmount, cited in an earlier contribution to this thread) so I myself am not entirely as ignorant as I may sometimes seem (or so I hope!).

Maybe rather than use the word "crime", which seems at least in this discussion to be overloaded, you might be happier were I to use the word "offence"? The translation of english "offence" into French is simple: "crime ou delit". As far as I can tell, the US concept of misdemeanor does not square with "delit", but the system is similar in that it acknowledges two grades of punishable offences. The concept is not present in English law, as far as I know, but there is a distinction between three kinds of criminal offences, summary offences (tried without jury), indictable offences (for which a jury is required and which you might want to call "crimes") and those in between (which may be dealt with under one or the other process). I think all systems acknowledge distinctions between categories of offence.

Lemurian, Mr. Taylor is a mechanic, not an engineer. An engineer in the US is someone who has passed the relevant professional examinations and is entitled to write the initials "P.E." after hisher name. Mr. Taylor is not such, neither is anyone working on the shop floor of a aeroengine maintenance facility. They are all mechanics. If such a person were to be a P.E., there should be no doubt at all, despite what MountainBear and countless legal judgements about US corporate responsibility on the Internet say, that this person is personally, in his capacity as P.E., responsible for the quality of the repair and the consequences of it. That is what being professionally accredited means in the US, as elsewhere.

wings folded, thank you for taking the time to explain carefully, in more detail, what these French legal concepts entail. I do believe I know most of what you say - I don't think I am completely "unclear" on the concepts - but yours is a valuable contribution to the debate for those who are both unaccustomed to French law and willing to learn. (There are also some contributors who abuse PPRuNe's hospitality, as you remark, but I don't think we really need concern ourselves with them, do you?)

For those who believe that airline safety is enhanced by a "no blame culture", I choose not to be part of that wider debate, because it goes beyond my skill or competence.

Nevertheless, I would encourage you to do so, please, because I and many others regard the conflicts between "no-blame culture" and just-recompense to be one of the pressing issues in aviation safety nowadays. The more people who think about the issues, the more chance we have of reaching a general resolution! And no one, just no one, is expert in all sides of the debate.

I am professionally a safety-critical systems expert, concentrating mainly but not exclusively (as you see) on computer-based systems. I have eminent colleagues with world-wide reputations who refuse to engage with the debate on the basis that they are "engineers" with interests in "safety" and compensation is a matter of "law". And "no blame culture" is apparently appropriate for engineers, and thereby safety, and nothing else. They apparently do not care to think about the hundreds of families who lost loved ones, and their breadwinners, in an accident and who, justly, according to thousands of years of established law with firm underpinnings in fairness and social welfare, ask for compensation and ask for someone to adjudicate their compensation. My engineering colleagues must go after the "take him for all he's got" extremists, and my legal colleagues must ask the engineers to have a heart for the families of those lost. That is the only way that I can see to go forward.

A fine debate, gentlemen and ladies! Thank you for helping to raise the standard!

PBL

[r75]

I have been following this thread with great interest from the start.The very sad fact is that a great many innocent people lost their lives on this ill fated flight.Now we may argue about the missing spacer,the downwind take off,overweight,too much fuel,et al but the cause of the tyre failure and to quote another source was:
"The wear strip fell from the DC-10 onto the runway. Why? The holes on the strip were drilled close together and not in proper alignment. This particular strip was a make-shift repair strip. As the holes wore through, the mechanic drilled new holes into it. Not only were the holes too close together but they were drilled too large of a diameter. Evidence suggests that rivets pulled through the holes, causing the wear strip to fall from the DC-10."
If such a part requires replacement on an aircraft,it is replaced in accordance with the manufacturers aircraft maintenance manual/the manufacturers structural repair manual/parts selected from the manufacturers illustrated parts catalogues.Should a repair be required out of this scope i.e.materials as original equipment manufacturer or beyond normal limits,the repair must be sanctioned by the original manufacturer and followed to the letter.This guy fell down on all counts.We are talking about peoples lives here.

[MountainBear]

I did not intend my comment to be rude and I am sorry you felt that it was :-(

I think you'll find that in many jurisdictions a general duty of care also extends to individuals. If A is employed by a security firm and carries a firearm when on the job, and he decides to show it off to a group of schoolkids taunting him, and he shoots one or two of them, then his employer may well have failed in its duty of care, but are you really suggesting that he walks off scot-free on the basis that he was in employment at the time of the incident? I doubt very much that he could. In many or most states, he would likely be prosecuted, and prosecutors would likely try to establish negligence (assuming no one believes the shooting was deliberate). Negligence is intimately bound with the concept of duty of care, for negligence is breach of that duty.

The problem with this example is two-fold.

First, the case at hand with the Concorde is most definitely not this case. Playing with a loaded gun is a far cry from playing with a scrap of metal on an airplane.

Second, your example would fall under the second exemption that I noted, which is actions which are otherwise innately criminal. In the USA unlawful killing has many forms and in this case he would most likely be charged with manslaughter, which is a criminal change.

[MountainBear]

It does mean that a correlation was found between his work and the final outcome,Yes, but under American law the standard would be whether or not that consequences was foreseeable. This is what I mentioned in my very first comment on the topic.

This is why PBL's example with a gun is not useful. Playing with a loaded gun it is foreseeable that someone could get hurt. I don't believe that is true with a mechanic bungling a repair on an airplane.

It's also important to note that under American law what is foreseeable is not what is foreseeable to the expert or even to another mechanic or what his license says. The standard is what is foreseeable to the "average man".

Applying that standard, what is foreseeable to the average man, I find it a simple fantasy that this mechanic could foresee that this incorrect repair was going to blow up the Concorde. I don't believe it.

I am not an expert on French law and I don't pretend to be. But I do understand American law. And in my opinion if this ruling is allowed to stand, the fact that it is legally correct under French law is so much the worse for France.

[wings folded]

wings folded, thank you for taking the time to explain carefully, in more detail, what these French legal concepts entail. I do believe I know most of what you say - I don't think I am completely "unclear" on the concepts - but yours is a valuable contribution to the debate for those who are both unaccustomed to French law and willing to learn. (There are also some contributors who abuse PPRuNe's hospitality, as you remark, but I don't think we really need concern ourselves with them, do you?)

Thank you for your remarks, and general all round good sense.


Originally Posted by wings folded
For those who believe that airline safety is enhanced by a "no blame culture", I choose not to be part of that wider debate, because it goes beyond my skill or competence.
Nevertheless, I would encourage you to do so, please, because I and many others regard the conflicts between "no-blame culture" and just-recompense to be one of the pressing issues in aviation safety nowadays. The more people who think about the issues, the more chance we have of reaching a general resolution! And no one, just no one, is expert in all sides of the debate.

Those are wise and humble words, and I admire them. I have views about safety in flying, and how best to try to achieve total safety.

When I flew, I tried always to be safe. I cannot say that I always achieved the perfection I hoped for. I no longer fly, so anyone could say that I am disqualified from holding a point of view. Hence my reticence before those who still fly.

[PBL]

MountainBear,

It's also important to note that under American law what is foreseeable is not what is foreseeable to the expert or even to another mechanic or what his license says. The standard is what is foreseeable to the "average man".

Applying that standard, what is foreseeable to the average man, I find it a simple fantasy that this mechanic could foresee that this incorrect repair was going to blow up the Concorde.


I agree with you that there is no way in which Mr. Taylor, or anyone else for that matter, could foresee what was about to happen.

Still, are you completely sure that he would not be strictly liable were he to be a P.E.?

PBL

[wings folded]

Yes, but under American law the standard would be whether or not that consequences was foreseeable. This is what I mentioned in my very first comment on the topic.

What is the relevance of American law?


It's also important to note that under American law what is foreseeable is not what is foreseeable to the expert or even to another mechanic or what his license says. The standard is what is foreseeable to the "average man".


What is the relevance of American law?


I am not an expert on French law and I don't pretend to be.

That is clear.

But I do understand American law. And in my opinion if this ruling is allowed to stand, the fact that it is legally correct under French law is so much the worse for France.

I expect France and its citizens will get over it sooner or later. Until of course they have the dawning of a revelation that everything American is perfect.

[Iron Duck]

Mountain Bear

Yes, but under American law the standard would be whether or not that consequences was foreseeable. This is what I mentioned in my very first comment on the topic.

The accident happened in France. French law is applicable. Several posters have gone to great lengths to explain this in detail. If the accident had happened on Mars, Martian law would be applicable.

US law is not applicable to this accident, and opinions based on US law are not helpful.

This is why PBL's example with a gun is not useful. Playing with a loaded gun it is foreseeable that someone could get hurt. I don't believe that is true with a mechanic bungling a repair on an airplane.

Nonsense. Bungling a repair on an aeroplane causes that aeroplane to be released to service with a known fault that is logged as repaired - i.e. in a state that differs from its documented state. There are myriad unknown possibilities consequent upon a bungled repair. That is why repairs must not be bungled in the first place.

It's also important to note that under American law what is foreseeable is not what is foreseeable to the expert or even to another mechanic or what his license says. The standard is what is foreseeable to the "average man".

Then training, licensing, experience and standards count for nothing? Forgive me for using the UK term "cobblers". The repairer was not an average man - he was a licensed mechanic. Part of the training involved in gaining that license involves being instructed that bungled repairs are likely to have unexpected consequences.

If US law assumes that the standards of the "average man" are to be applied to a trained specialist, in his specialist field, then we have a prime example of the law as an ass.

Applying that standard, what is foreseeable to the average man, I find it a simple fantasy that this mechanic could foresee that this incorrect repair was going to blow up the Concorde. I don't believe it.

There is no need to. It is only necessary to believe that the mechanic knew that he had bungled the repair, and that in so doing he had invited the possibility of unexpected consequences.

One for example might have been a thrust reverser malfunction caused by the missing wear strip, just at the point at which the DC10 required maximum reverse performance in order to avoid careering off the end of a runway into a ravine. Bangalore, say.

Edit: that should be Mangalore, obviously. And, not being a licensed mechanic, I have no idea whether the bungled repair might have caused a reverser malfunction. But the wear strip was specified for a reason, and there must be consequences arising from its absence. I think I make my point.

That the dropped strip would knock down Concorde was not directly foreseeable is irrelevant. That the repair was not performed according to SOPs and was therefore liklely to have an unknown performance was directly foreseeable.

I'm not an aviation professional. I'm a freelance. I am directly responsible for everything I do. I can't run off to mummy employer to take the rap if I foul up.

I like it that way. It is bracing, and concentrates the mind. Try it sometime.

[MountainBear]

What is the relevance of American law?

American law produces safer aviation outcomes than European law. Despite several invitations by myself over the last several pages of posts not a single individual has explained how European law produces better outcomes. Because they can't. All we get is jingoistic tripe from posters like Iron Duck and yourself because honestly you don't have a fact on your side, just chest beating.

I won't respond to your posts any further.