T28D
21st Oct 2013, 10:40
LAST WEEK, A FRENCHAPPEALS COURT overturned a manslaughter conviction against Continental Airlinesfor its role in the crash of an Air France Concorde outside Paris twelve yearsago.
Flight 4590 was acharter destined for New York ’s JFK airport on July 25th, 2000, carryingmostly German tourists headed to South America . As it neared takeoff speed,the Concorde struck a thin metal strip on the runway, causing one of its tiresto burst. The strip had fallen from the underside of a Continental AirlinesDC-10 that had departed minutes earlier, bound for Houston . Chunks of theburst tire impacted the Concorde’s wing at tremendous velocity, resulting in apowerful shock wave within the wing’s fuel tank that ultimately punctured it.Gases from the engines then ignited leaking fuel, touching off a huge fire.
The crew wrestled thecrippled jet into the air, but lost control moments later, slamming into ahotel. All 109 passengers and crew perished, as did four people on the ground.
All along, conventionalwisdom, bolstered by lethargic media coverage, has held that the fuel tank firewas the direct cause of the crash. This from the Associated Press a few daysago, is a typical example of what the public has been reading and hearing: “Theburst tire sent bits of rubber flying, puncturing the fuel tanks, which startedthe fire that brought down the plane.”
But this isn’t so.
There’s no denying thejet ran over an errant piece of metal that caused a tire explosion and aresultant fire. But while the fire was visually spectacular — caught on camera,it trails behind the plane in a hellish rooster tail — experts say that asidefrom damaging the number 2 engine, it was very much survivable, and likelywould have burned itself out in a matter of a few minutes. Not only was itsurvivable, but it was probably avoidable as well, had it not been for a chainof errors and oversights that, to date, nobody wants to talk about —particularly not European investigators.
The plane went down notbecause of any fire, directly, but because 1., it was flying too slowly; 2., itwas several tons overweight and beyond its aft centre of gravity limit; 3., twoof its four engines were damaged or erroneously shut down; 4., it wasover-fuelled.
It was flying too slowlybecause the pilot at the controls, Christian Marty, had pulled the jet into theair to avoid skidding sideways off the runway and colliding with another plane. Whyit was skidding has beenthe subject of contention, but as we’ll see in a minute, many believe the skidwas caused by an improperly repaired landing gear.
Under normalcircumstances Marty still had enough speed to climb away safely; however, he nolonger had enough power. One engine had been badly damaged due to ingestion offoreign material — not only pieces of exploded tire, but debris from a runwayedge light the jet had run over during the skid. A second engine, meanwhile,was shut down completely by the cockpit flight engineer — at a time andaltitude when he was not supposed to do this, when remainingthrust from that engine was desperately needed for survival.
All the while, the planewas an estimated six tons above its maximum allowable weight based on weather conditionsat the time of the crash.
At proper weight, thejet would have become airborne prior to the point when it ran over the metalstrip. Further, the fuel tank that was struck by tire debris had beenover-filled. In normal operations the wing tank was not to be filled beyond 95%of capacity to allow for thermal expansion during flight, with an exception forup to 98% capacity under certain conditions. The tank on the ill-fated flightwas filled to 100%, leaving no space for compression. Fuel itself will notcompress, so when debris struck the tank, it resulted in a shock wave thatcaused a puncture — in a location several meters away from the point of impact.
The November 29thverdict was, if nothing else, fair. “ France is one of a handful of countriesthat routinely seek criminal indictments in transportation accidents,regardless of whether there is clear evidence of criminal intent or negligence,“reported the New York Times. All along, aviationsafety specialists were highly critical of the suit, believing (as I do), thatsuch prosecutions set a dangerous and destructive precedent, undermining crashinvestigations and air safety in general. “The aviation safety community isgoing to view this verdict with great deal of relief,” said William R. Voss,president of the Flight Safety Foundation, speaking in the Timesarticle. “It reminds usthat human error, regardless of the tragic outcome, is different from a crime.”
Well and good. However,does the full and true story of the disaster remain untold?
I point you to a storythat ran in the British newspaper TheObserver in 2005. It’sseldom that I have flattering things to say about the press’s coverage ofaviation accidents, but this particular piece, by reporter David Rose, is agripping, startling story.
A link to the full article is here (http://observer.guardian.co.uk/print/0%2c3858%2c4185791-102274%2c00.html). In addition, below, isa version that I have edited and condensed for clarity…
Doomed: THE REAL STORY OF FLIGHT 4590
David Rose
It is an indelible image, heavy with symbolism: the photograph taken on25 July 2000, at the moment Concorde became a technological Icarus. The greatwhite bird rears up over runway 26 at Charles de Gaulle, immediately aftertakeoff. Already mortally wounded, flames bleed uncontrollably from beneath theleft-hand wing. Less than two minutes later, the world’s only supersonicairliner will fling itself into the Paris suburb of Gonesse, killing all 109 onboard and another five on the ground.
The official investigation has focused almost entirely on the fire.According to the French accident investigation bureau, the BEA, it broke outwhen the plane passed over a strip of metal on the runway. A tyre burst; achunk of rubber thudded into a fuel tank inside the wing; jet fuel poured outof a hole and ignited.
The hot gases caused two of the engines to falter, and despite a valiantstruggle by Captain Christian Marty, a daredevil skier who once crossed theAtlantic on a windsurf board, the loss of thrust made the crash inevitable.
An investigation by TheObserver suggests thetruth is much more complicated. In the words of John Hutchinson, a Concordecaptain for 15 years, the fire on its own should have been “eminentlysurvivable; the pilot should have been able to fly his way out of trouble.” Thereason why he failed to do so, Hutchinson believes, was a lethal combination ofoperational error and negligence. This appears to have been a crash with morethan one contributing factor, most of which were avoidable.
Go back to that photograph. An amazing picture: but where was it taken?The answer is: inside an Air France Boeing 747 which had just landed from Japan, and was waiting to cross Concorde’s runway on its way back to the terminal.Its passengers included Jacques Chirac and his wife, the President and firstlady of France , returning from the G7 summit.
Concorde looks to be nearby because it had been close to hitting the747, an event which would have turned both aircraft into a giant fireball. Veeringwildly to the left, like a recalcitrant supermarket trolley with a jammedwheel, Concorde’s undercarriage had locked askew.
When Marty pulled back on the control column to raise the nose and taketo the air — the process pilots call “rotation” — the plane’s airspeed was only188 knots, 11 knots below the minimum recommended velocity required for thismanoeuvre.
But he had no choice: the plane was about to leave the tarmac altogetherand plough into the soft and bumpy grass at its side. That might have rippedoff the landing gear, leaving Concorde to overturn and blow up on its own. Ifnot, the 747 lay straight ahead. So he took to the air, although he knew he wastravelling too slowly, which would impair the damaged plane’s chances ofsurvival.
Shocking evidence now emerging suggests that the Air France ConcordeF-BTSC had not been properly maintained. The airline’s ground staff had failedto replace a “spacer” — a vital component of the landing gear which keeps thewheels in proper alignment. Although the BEA disputes it, there is compellingevidence that it was the missing spacer which may have caused the plane to skewto the left, so forcing Marty to leave the ground too early.
At the same time, the plane was operating outside its legally certifiedlimits. When it stood at the end of the runway, ready to roll, it was more thansix tonnes over its approved maximum takeoff weight for the given conditions,with its centre of gravity pushed dangerously far to the rear. Even before theblowout, Marty was already pushing the envelope.
The stresses on Concorde’s landing gear are unusually severe. At regularintervals, the various load-bearing components become “lifed” and must bereplaced. When the undercarriage bogeys are taken apart and reassembled, thework must be done according to a rigid formula, and rigorously inspected andassessed.
Concorde F-BTSC went into the hangar at Charles de Gaulle on 18 July, aweek before the crash. The part which was lifed was the left undercarriage beam— the horizontal tube through which the two wheel axles pass at each end. Inthe middle is a low-friction pivot which connects the beam to the vertical legextending down from inside the wing. The bits of the pivot which bear the loadare two steel shear bushes. To keep them in position, they are separated by thespacer: a piece of grey, anodised aluminium about five inches in diameter andtwelve inches long. When the plane left the hangar on 21 July, the spacer wasmissing. After the crash, it was found in the Air France workshop, stillattached to the old beam which had been replaced.
In the days before the accident, the aircraft flew to New York and backtwice. At first, the load-bearing shear bushes remained in the right positions.But the right-hand bush began to slip, down into the gap where there shouldhave been a spacer. By the day of the crash, it had moved about seven inches,until the two washers were almost touching. Instead of being held firmly in asnug-fitting pivot, the beam and the wheels were wobbling, with about threedegrees of movement possible in any direction. As the plane taxied to the startof the runway, there was nothing to keep the front wheels of the undercarriagein line with the back. The supermarket trolley was ready to jam.
Exactly when it started to do so is uncertain. Jean-Marie Chauve, whoflew Concordes with Air France until his retirement, and Michel Suaud, for manyyears a Concorde flight engineer, believe the undercarriage was already out ofalignment when the plane began to move down the runway..
They have spent the past six months preparing a 60-page report on thecrash. Chauve said: “The acceleration was abnormally slow from the start. Therewas something retarding the aircraft, holding it back.” Chauve and Suaud’sreport contains detailed calculations which conclude that without thisretardation, the plane would have taken off 1,694 metres from the start of therunway — before reachingthe fateful metal strip.
The BEA contests these findings, saying that the acceleration was normaluntil the tyre burst. It also maintains that even after the blowout, themissing spacer was insignificant.
The BEA’s critics say that once the tyre burst, the load on the threeremaining tyres became uneven, and even if the wheels had been more or lessstraight before, they now twisted disastrously to the side. The smoking gun isa remarkable series of photographs in the BEA’s own preliminary report. Theyshow unmistakably the skid marks of four tyres, heading off the runway on toits concrete shoulder, almost reaching the rough grass beyond.
In one picture, the foreground depicts a smashed yellow steel landinglight on the very edge of the made-up surface, which was clipped by theaircraft as Marty tried to wrest it into the air. Industry sources haveconfirmed that this probably had further, damaging results. Until then thenumber one engine had been functioning almost normally but when the plane hitthe landing light it ingested hard material which caused it to surge and fail.This hard material, the sources say, was probably parts of the broken light.
John Hutchinson said: “The blowout alone would not cause these marks.You’d get intermittent blobs from flapping rubber, but these are very clearlyskids.”
In its interim report, and in a statement, the BEA said that theleftwards yaw was caused not by the faulty landing gear but by “the loss ofthrust from engines one and two”.
There are several problems with this analysis. First, as the BEA’s ownpublished data reveals, the thrust from engine one was almost normal until theend of the skid, when it took in the parts of the landing light. It is simplynot true that the yaw began when both engines failed.
Second, those who fly the plane say that a loss of engine power will notcause an uncontrollable yaw. TheObserverhas spoken to five former and serving Concorde captains and flyingofficers. All have repeatedly experienced the loss of an engine shortly beforetakeoff in the computerised Concorde training simulator; one of them, twice,has done so for real. All agree, in John Hutchinson’s words, “It’s no big dealat all. You’re not using anything like the full amount of rudder to keep theplane straight; the yaw is totally containable.”
Other avoidable factors were further loading the dice, making it stillmore difficult to rescue the plane. When Marty paused at the start of therunway, his instruments told him that his Concorde had 1.2 tonnes of extra fuelwhich should have been burnt during the taxi. In addition, it contained 19 bagsof luggage which were not included on the manifest, and had been loaded at thelast minute, weighing a further 500 kg. These took the total mass to about 186tonnes — a tonne above the aircraft’s certified maximum structural weight.
Meanwhile, in the interval between Concorde’s leaving the terminal andreaching the start of the runway, something very important had changed: thewind. It had been still. Now, as the control tower told Marty, he had aneight-knot tailwind. The first thing pilots learn is that one takes off againstthe wind. Yet as the voice record makes clear, Marty and his crew seemed not toreact to this information at all.
Had they paused for a moment, they might have recomputed the data onwhich they had planned their takeoff. If they had, they would have learnt avery worrying fact. The tailwind meant that Concorde’s runway-allowable takeoffweight was just 180 tonnes — at least six tonnes less than the weight of Flight4590.
[NOTE: What the reporter is saying here is that once the tailwind wasaccounted for, the plane was now sixtons above the takeoff limit for that runway.]
John Hutchinson said: “The change in the wind was an incrediblerevelation, and no one says anything. Marty should have done the sums and toldthe tower, ‘Hang on, we’ve got to redo our calculations.’”
The extra weight had a further consequence beyond simply making itharder to get into the air. It shifted the centre of gravity backwards: theextra bags almost certainly went into the rear hold, and all the extra fuel wasin the rearmost tank.
A plane’s centre of gravity is expressed as a percentage: so many percent fore or aft. Brian Trubshaw and John Cochrane, Concorde’s two test pilotswhen the aircraft was being developed in the early 1970s, set the aft operatinglimit at 54 per cent — beyond that, they found, it risked becominguncontrollable, likely to rear up backwards and crash, exactly as Flight 4590did in its final moments over Gonesse.
The doomed plane’s centre of gravity went beyond 54 per cent. The BEAstates a figure of 54.2 per cent. A senior industry source, who cannot be namedfor contractual reasons, says the true figure may have been worse: with theextra fuel and bags, it may have been up to 54.6 per cent. And as the fuelgushed from the hole in the forward tank, the centre of gravity moved stillfurther back.
When the plane was just 25 feet off the ground, Gilles Jardinaud, theflight engineer, shut down the ailing number two engine. Both French andBritish pilots say it was another disastrous mistake, which breached all setprocedures. The engine itself was not on fire, and as the tank emptied and thefire burnt itself out, it would probably have recovered. The fixed drill forshutting down an engine requires the crew to wait until the flight is stable at400 feet, and to do so then only on a set of commands from the captain.
In a comment which might be applied to the whole unfolding tragedy, JohnHutchinson said: “Discipline had broken down. The captain doesn’t know what’shappening; the co-pilot doesn’t know; it’s a shambles.”
Previous reports of the tragedy have described the crash as an act ofGod, a freak occurrence which exposed a fatal structural weakness in theaircraft which could have appeared at any time. The investigation by The Observer suggests the truth may not only bemore complicated, but also sadder, more sordid. Men, not God, caused Concordeto crash, and their omissions and errors may have turned an escapable mishapinto catastrophe.
The issues raised byDavid Rose, which at first were dismissed as so much conspiracy mongering, arenow generally accepted facts within the aviation community, and have been moreor less confirmed by investigators, however quietly. The November, 2012 courtruling does not explicitly says so, but it is, in its own way, a tacitacknowledgment of the fullstory— one in which Continental Airlines played at worst a supporting role. Thisaccident is an outstanding example of something we’ve seen time and time againin airplane crashes: multiple errors, none of them necessarily fatal on theirown accord, combining and compounding at the worst possible moment toprecipitate a catastrophe. Rarely is the cause of disaster something simple andunambiguous.
Both British Airways andAir France, the only two operators of the Concorde, grounded their fleetsfollowing the 2000 disaster. The planes were reintroduced following a fuel-tankredesign, but both carriers withdrew them from service permanently in 2003,after 27 years of service, citing prohibitively expensive operating and upkeepcosts. Only twenty Concordes had been built, four of which were prototypes orpre-production examples. The Air France crash marked its only fatal accident.
Concorde, as you may ormay not know, was not the only supersonic passenger aircraft. There was alsoits Soviet cousin, the Tupolev Tu-144, which also suffered a single fatalaccident over the brief course of its commercial tenure. In 1973 a Tu-144crashed during a demonstration at the Paris Air Show. The Tupolev had taken offfrom Le Bourget airport, where Captain Marty and his crew were attempting anemergency landing when their Concorde went down in 2000.
Flight 4590 was acharter destined for New York ’s JFK airport on July 25th, 2000, carryingmostly German tourists headed to South America . As it neared takeoff speed,the Concorde struck a thin metal strip on the runway, causing one of its tiresto burst. The strip had fallen from the underside of a Continental AirlinesDC-10 that had departed minutes earlier, bound for Houston . Chunks of theburst tire impacted the Concorde’s wing at tremendous velocity, resulting in apowerful shock wave within the wing’s fuel tank that ultimately punctured it.Gases from the engines then ignited leaking fuel, touching off a huge fire.
The crew wrestled thecrippled jet into the air, but lost control moments later, slamming into ahotel. All 109 passengers and crew perished, as did four people on the ground.
All along, conventionalwisdom, bolstered by lethargic media coverage, has held that the fuel tank firewas the direct cause of the crash. This from the Associated Press a few daysago, is a typical example of what the public has been reading and hearing: “Theburst tire sent bits of rubber flying, puncturing the fuel tanks, which startedthe fire that brought down the plane.”
But this isn’t so.
There’s no denying thejet ran over an errant piece of metal that caused a tire explosion and aresultant fire. But while the fire was visually spectacular — caught on camera,it trails behind the plane in a hellish rooster tail — experts say that asidefrom damaging the number 2 engine, it was very much survivable, and likelywould have burned itself out in a matter of a few minutes. Not only was itsurvivable, but it was probably avoidable as well, had it not been for a chainof errors and oversights that, to date, nobody wants to talk about —particularly not European investigators.
The plane went down notbecause of any fire, directly, but because 1., it was flying too slowly; 2., itwas several tons overweight and beyond its aft centre of gravity limit; 3., twoof its four engines were damaged or erroneously shut down; 4., it wasover-fuelled.
It was flying too slowlybecause the pilot at the controls, Christian Marty, had pulled the jet into theair to avoid skidding sideways off the runway and colliding with another plane. Whyit was skidding has beenthe subject of contention, but as we’ll see in a minute, many believe the skidwas caused by an improperly repaired landing gear.
Under normalcircumstances Marty still had enough speed to climb away safely; however, he nolonger had enough power. One engine had been badly damaged due to ingestion offoreign material — not only pieces of exploded tire, but debris from a runwayedge light the jet had run over during the skid. A second engine, meanwhile,was shut down completely by the cockpit flight engineer — at a time andaltitude when he was not supposed to do this, when remainingthrust from that engine was desperately needed for survival.
All the while, the planewas an estimated six tons above its maximum allowable weight based on weather conditionsat the time of the crash.
At proper weight, thejet would have become airborne prior to the point when it ran over the metalstrip. Further, the fuel tank that was struck by tire debris had beenover-filled. In normal operations the wing tank was not to be filled beyond 95%of capacity to allow for thermal expansion during flight, with an exception forup to 98% capacity under certain conditions. The tank on the ill-fated flightwas filled to 100%, leaving no space for compression. Fuel itself will notcompress, so when debris struck the tank, it resulted in a shock wave thatcaused a puncture — in a location several meters away from the point of impact.
The November 29thverdict was, if nothing else, fair. “ France is one of a handful of countriesthat routinely seek criminal indictments in transportation accidents,regardless of whether there is clear evidence of criminal intent or negligence,“reported the New York Times. All along, aviationsafety specialists were highly critical of the suit, believing (as I do), thatsuch prosecutions set a dangerous and destructive precedent, undermining crashinvestigations and air safety in general. “The aviation safety community isgoing to view this verdict with great deal of relief,” said William R. Voss,president of the Flight Safety Foundation, speaking in the Timesarticle. “It reminds usthat human error, regardless of the tragic outcome, is different from a crime.”
Well and good. However,does the full and true story of the disaster remain untold?
I point you to a storythat ran in the British newspaper TheObserver in 2005. It’sseldom that I have flattering things to say about the press’s coverage ofaviation accidents, but this particular piece, by reporter David Rose, is agripping, startling story.
A link to the full article is here (http://observer.guardian.co.uk/print/0%2c3858%2c4185791-102274%2c00.html). In addition, below, isa version that I have edited and condensed for clarity…
Doomed: THE REAL STORY OF FLIGHT 4590
David Rose
It is an indelible image, heavy with symbolism: the photograph taken on25 July 2000, at the moment Concorde became a technological Icarus. The greatwhite bird rears up over runway 26 at Charles de Gaulle, immediately aftertakeoff. Already mortally wounded, flames bleed uncontrollably from beneath theleft-hand wing. Less than two minutes later, the world’s only supersonicairliner will fling itself into the Paris suburb of Gonesse, killing all 109 onboard and another five on the ground.
The official investigation has focused almost entirely on the fire.According to the French accident investigation bureau, the BEA, it broke outwhen the plane passed over a strip of metal on the runway. A tyre burst; achunk of rubber thudded into a fuel tank inside the wing; jet fuel poured outof a hole and ignited.
The hot gases caused two of the engines to falter, and despite a valiantstruggle by Captain Christian Marty, a daredevil skier who once crossed theAtlantic on a windsurf board, the loss of thrust made the crash inevitable.
An investigation by TheObserver suggests thetruth is much more complicated. In the words of John Hutchinson, a Concordecaptain for 15 years, the fire on its own should have been “eminentlysurvivable; the pilot should have been able to fly his way out of trouble.” Thereason why he failed to do so, Hutchinson believes, was a lethal combination ofoperational error and negligence. This appears to have been a crash with morethan one contributing factor, most of which were avoidable.
Go back to that photograph. An amazing picture: but where was it taken?The answer is: inside an Air France Boeing 747 which had just landed from Japan, and was waiting to cross Concorde’s runway on its way back to the terminal.Its passengers included Jacques Chirac and his wife, the President and firstlady of France , returning from the G7 summit.
Concorde looks to be nearby because it had been close to hitting the747, an event which would have turned both aircraft into a giant fireball. Veeringwildly to the left, like a recalcitrant supermarket trolley with a jammedwheel, Concorde’s undercarriage had locked askew.
When Marty pulled back on the control column to raise the nose and taketo the air — the process pilots call “rotation” — the plane’s airspeed was only188 knots, 11 knots below the minimum recommended velocity required for thismanoeuvre.
But he had no choice: the plane was about to leave the tarmac altogetherand plough into the soft and bumpy grass at its side. That might have rippedoff the landing gear, leaving Concorde to overturn and blow up on its own. Ifnot, the 747 lay straight ahead. So he took to the air, although he knew he wastravelling too slowly, which would impair the damaged plane’s chances ofsurvival.
Shocking evidence now emerging suggests that the Air France ConcordeF-BTSC had not been properly maintained. The airline’s ground staff had failedto replace a “spacer” — a vital component of the landing gear which keeps thewheels in proper alignment. Although the BEA disputes it, there is compellingevidence that it was the missing spacer which may have caused the plane to skewto the left, so forcing Marty to leave the ground too early.
At the same time, the plane was operating outside its legally certifiedlimits. When it stood at the end of the runway, ready to roll, it was more thansix tonnes over its approved maximum takeoff weight for the given conditions,with its centre of gravity pushed dangerously far to the rear. Even before theblowout, Marty was already pushing the envelope.
The stresses on Concorde’s landing gear are unusually severe. At regularintervals, the various load-bearing components become “lifed” and must bereplaced. When the undercarriage bogeys are taken apart and reassembled, thework must be done according to a rigid formula, and rigorously inspected andassessed.
Concorde F-BTSC went into the hangar at Charles de Gaulle on 18 July, aweek before the crash. The part which was lifed was the left undercarriage beam— the horizontal tube through which the two wheel axles pass at each end. Inthe middle is a low-friction pivot which connects the beam to the vertical legextending down from inside the wing. The bits of the pivot which bear the loadare two steel shear bushes. To keep them in position, they are separated by thespacer: a piece of grey, anodised aluminium about five inches in diameter andtwelve inches long. When the plane left the hangar on 21 July, the spacer wasmissing. After the crash, it was found in the Air France workshop, stillattached to the old beam which had been replaced.
In the days before the accident, the aircraft flew to New York and backtwice. At first, the load-bearing shear bushes remained in the right positions.But the right-hand bush began to slip, down into the gap where there shouldhave been a spacer. By the day of the crash, it had moved about seven inches,until the two washers were almost touching. Instead of being held firmly in asnug-fitting pivot, the beam and the wheels were wobbling, with about threedegrees of movement possible in any direction. As the plane taxied to the startof the runway, there was nothing to keep the front wheels of the undercarriagein line with the back. The supermarket trolley was ready to jam.
Exactly when it started to do so is uncertain. Jean-Marie Chauve, whoflew Concordes with Air France until his retirement, and Michel Suaud, for manyyears a Concorde flight engineer, believe the undercarriage was already out ofalignment when the plane began to move down the runway..
They have spent the past six months preparing a 60-page report on thecrash. Chauve said: “The acceleration was abnormally slow from the start. Therewas something retarding the aircraft, holding it back.” Chauve and Suaud’sreport contains detailed calculations which conclude that without thisretardation, the plane would have taken off 1,694 metres from the start of therunway — before reachingthe fateful metal strip.
The BEA contests these findings, saying that the acceleration was normaluntil the tyre burst. It also maintains that even after the blowout, themissing spacer was insignificant.
The BEA’s critics say that once the tyre burst, the load on the threeremaining tyres became uneven, and even if the wheels had been more or lessstraight before, they now twisted disastrously to the side. The smoking gun isa remarkable series of photographs in the BEA’s own preliminary report. Theyshow unmistakably the skid marks of four tyres, heading off the runway on toits concrete shoulder, almost reaching the rough grass beyond.
In one picture, the foreground depicts a smashed yellow steel landinglight on the very edge of the made-up surface, which was clipped by theaircraft as Marty tried to wrest it into the air. Industry sources haveconfirmed that this probably had further, damaging results. Until then thenumber one engine had been functioning almost normally but when the plane hitthe landing light it ingested hard material which caused it to surge and fail.This hard material, the sources say, was probably parts of the broken light.
John Hutchinson said: “The blowout alone would not cause these marks.You’d get intermittent blobs from flapping rubber, but these are very clearlyskids.”
In its interim report, and in a statement, the BEA said that theleftwards yaw was caused not by the faulty landing gear but by “the loss ofthrust from engines one and two”.
There are several problems with this analysis. First, as the BEA’s ownpublished data reveals, the thrust from engine one was almost normal until theend of the skid, when it took in the parts of the landing light. It is simplynot true that the yaw began when both engines failed.
Second, those who fly the plane say that a loss of engine power will notcause an uncontrollable yaw. TheObserverhas spoken to five former and serving Concorde captains and flyingofficers. All have repeatedly experienced the loss of an engine shortly beforetakeoff in the computerised Concorde training simulator; one of them, twice,has done so for real. All agree, in John Hutchinson’s words, “It’s no big dealat all. You’re not using anything like the full amount of rudder to keep theplane straight; the yaw is totally containable.”
Other avoidable factors were further loading the dice, making it stillmore difficult to rescue the plane. When Marty paused at the start of therunway, his instruments told him that his Concorde had 1.2 tonnes of extra fuelwhich should have been burnt during the taxi. In addition, it contained 19 bagsof luggage which were not included on the manifest, and had been loaded at thelast minute, weighing a further 500 kg. These took the total mass to about 186tonnes — a tonne above the aircraft’s certified maximum structural weight.
Meanwhile, in the interval between Concorde’s leaving the terminal andreaching the start of the runway, something very important had changed: thewind. It had been still. Now, as the control tower told Marty, he had aneight-knot tailwind. The first thing pilots learn is that one takes off againstthe wind. Yet as the voice record makes clear, Marty and his crew seemed not toreact to this information at all.
Had they paused for a moment, they might have recomputed the data onwhich they had planned their takeoff. If they had, they would have learnt avery worrying fact. The tailwind meant that Concorde’s runway-allowable takeoffweight was just 180 tonnes — at least six tonnes less than the weight of Flight4590.
[NOTE: What the reporter is saying here is that once the tailwind wasaccounted for, the plane was now sixtons above the takeoff limit for that runway.]
John Hutchinson said: “The change in the wind was an incrediblerevelation, and no one says anything. Marty should have done the sums and toldthe tower, ‘Hang on, we’ve got to redo our calculations.’”
The extra weight had a further consequence beyond simply making itharder to get into the air. It shifted the centre of gravity backwards: theextra bags almost certainly went into the rear hold, and all the extra fuel wasin the rearmost tank.
A plane’s centre of gravity is expressed as a percentage: so many percent fore or aft. Brian Trubshaw and John Cochrane, Concorde’s two test pilotswhen the aircraft was being developed in the early 1970s, set the aft operatinglimit at 54 per cent — beyond that, they found, it risked becominguncontrollable, likely to rear up backwards and crash, exactly as Flight 4590did in its final moments over Gonesse.
The doomed plane’s centre of gravity went beyond 54 per cent. The BEAstates a figure of 54.2 per cent. A senior industry source, who cannot be namedfor contractual reasons, says the true figure may have been worse: with theextra fuel and bags, it may have been up to 54.6 per cent. And as the fuelgushed from the hole in the forward tank, the centre of gravity moved stillfurther back.
When the plane was just 25 feet off the ground, Gilles Jardinaud, theflight engineer, shut down the ailing number two engine. Both French andBritish pilots say it was another disastrous mistake, which breached all setprocedures. The engine itself was not on fire, and as the tank emptied and thefire burnt itself out, it would probably have recovered. The fixed drill forshutting down an engine requires the crew to wait until the flight is stable at400 feet, and to do so then only on a set of commands from the captain.
In a comment which might be applied to the whole unfolding tragedy, JohnHutchinson said: “Discipline had broken down. The captain doesn’t know what’shappening; the co-pilot doesn’t know; it’s a shambles.”
Previous reports of the tragedy have described the crash as an act ofGod, a freak occurrence which exposed a fatal structural weakness in theaircraft which could have appeared at any time. The investigation by The Observer suggests the truth may not only bemore complicated, but also sadder, more sordid. Men, not God, caused Concordeto crash, and their omissions and errors may have turned an escapable mishapinto catastrophe.
The issues raised byDavid Rose, which at first were dismissed as so much conspiracy mongering, arenow generally accepted facts within the aviation community, and have been moreor less confirmed by investigators, however quietly. The November, 2012 courtruling does not explicitly says so, but it is, in its own way, a tacitacknowledgment of the fullstory— one in which Continental Airlines played at worst a supporting role. Thisaccident is an outstanding example of something we’ve seen time and time againin airplane crashes: multiple errors, none of them necessarily fatal on theirown accord, combining and compounding at the worst possible moment toprecipitate a catastrophe. Rarely is the cause of disaster something simple andunambiguous.
Both British Airways andAir France, the only two operators of the Concorde, grounded their fleetsfollowing the 2000 disaster. The planes were reintroduced following a fuel-tankredesign, but both carriers withdrew them from service permanently in 2003,after 27 years of service, citing prohibitively expensive operating and upkeepcosts. Only twenty Concordes had been built, four of which were prototypes orpre-production examples. The Air France crash marked its only fatal accident.
Concorde, as you may ormay not know, was not the only supersonic passenger aircraft. There was alsoits Soviet cousin, the Tupolev Tu-144, which also suffered a single fatalaccident over the brief course of its commercial tenure. In 1973 a Tu-144crashed during a demonstration at the Paris Air Show. The Tupolev had taken offfrom Le Bourget airport, where Captain Marty and his crew were attempting anemergency landing when their Concorde went down in 2000.