Five people to face Concorde crash trial

[S.F.L.Y]

I remember in one case a HUGE patch over the main passenger entry door

I prefer to have an ugly patch than to regularly loose airfoils in flight...

Can you seriously be considered as a neutral party given your curriculum?

No matter how bad was AF, BA wasn't good enough to avoid 5 fuel tank perforation caused by tires, which from my point of view is enough to be "concerned" by the potential associated risks. The rest is BS, just like your dishonest attempt to persuade us that tank 5 was over-pressurized without a single piece of evidence.

[Desk Jockey]

Hydraulic Contamination.

Just for the record Air France were not the only operator to have to replace all the hydraulic components on a Concorde due to fluid contamination.

[M2dude]

Hydraulics

Correct sir, OAG due to water contamination of the fluid, circa 1981. Not QUITE the same results or implications as the AF incident, but it was a lesson learned by all. At this time in the early 80's no one anywhere quite realised how sensitive M2V was to hygroscopic contamination. A rigid airtight storage regime for M2V was employed after that, with no further reported cases of M2V contamination. Not quite the same as filling up with Skydrol though, I think you will agree.
As a point of interest to all other sensible posters here (that excludes one who obviously learned aircraft from a book, I sometimes wonder if he even knows which end that the pilot sits), AF had some flying control surface panel failures, they were as undramatic as the BA ones. They had fewer, because as the majority of people here realise, AF flew a fraction of the hours of the British A/C. These failures were due to water ingestion into imperfections in the control surface, causing delamination. As the aircraft spent the majority of it's life at 400 deg's K, the expansion caused the delams to seperate. It is unlikely that a subsonic A/C would have had a similar problem (as a matter of interest, these failures only occured after MANY thousands of supersonic flying hour)s. I hope that most of you accept that my comments here are not my opinions, they are generally facts borne out by a huge number of years of technical knowledge and experience.
It is good that there is so much in the way of constructive comments made here by the vast majority of posters.

[ExSp33db1rd]

.......And I mean "Expert"..........

X is an unknown quantity, and a Spurt is a Drip Under Pressure.

[M2dude]

To try and get back on track; Five people including Continental Airlines employees are in a French court, on trial over the Air France Concorde crash in July 2000. The debate within this forum has geerally been whether the BEA report into this tragedy (which is thole whole basis of this court case) was objective and fair in the first place. This debate is mainly centred around the BEA dismissal of critical evidence by highly credible eye witness reports and discounting out of hand the omission of a critical component by Air France maintenence personell. The whole blame for the crash is placed on a titanium strip on the runway, which had fallen from a Continental DC10, causing a tyre blowout and subsequent jettisoning of a large section of wing lower fuel tank surface. The resulting massive fuel stream flowing out of the fuel tank ignited and caused a massive fire, which resulted in the eventual crash of the aircraft, with the loss of 113 souls.
The point being made here (and this is NOT just my opinion; as I said before this is the opinion of a very large number of highly respected and learned people, not just in the UK, but elsewhere too:

1. The aircraft was highly over weight, taking off with a tailwind. The CG was way beyond the ABSOLUTE maximum for T/O of 54%, reduci9ng the effectiveness of nose wheel steering. (Particularly during the initial phase of the T/O roll).
2. An ommited spacer on the front L/H bogie had resulted in massive distortion in the geometry of the front wheels on this U/C. (Borne out by large amounts of R/H rudder application from the early to the very last satages of the T/O roll, with very little or no heading change. The trauma on the U/C was mitigated by rolling over an initial very rough runway surface, awaiting repair.
3. Eye witnesses (including 2 French airport firefighters, the closest of all to the A/C) categorilcaly stated that they saw smoke and flames eminating from the L/H U/C long before 'the titanium strip'.
4. The hydro-dynamics of the rupturing of the wing panel were like nothing ever experienced before, adding to the theory that this never was a simple tyre blowout,. There is an additional theory, not accepted by all that fuel tank #5 was being pressurised due to an illegal switch position. As tank 5 was directly feeding the ruptured #2 tank, the additional pressure of head plus pump pressure contributed to the hydo-dynamics of the event. This additional point however is not pivotal.
5. The A/C never achieved safe flying speed, on a day when the V2 was 220KTS, takeoff was at 201 knots, the maximum achieved IAS was 211 KTS. When the A/C was only running on 3 full thrust producing engines (#1 being seriously damaged by a runway light) #2 engine was shut down by the F/E strictly against SOPs. It was impossible for the A/C to remain flying after this.

[S.F.L.Y]

M2dude, how is hydraulic fluid contamination relevant to the Gonesse accident?

We understand that you want to make a point on the bad AF maintenance, but I don't think this is relevant to anything else than the tire failure. The consequences of such failure aren't related to the maintenance, but to a particular and known weakness.

All parties involved in the concorde operations were aware of the high rate of tire incidents and associated fuel tank perforations (without counting the BA fuel tank perforation caused by the 10 lost wheel nuts... maintenance issues?).

Pretending that BA wasn't exposed to any risk isn't fairly honest. There was a well known history of incidents with fuel tanks and engine damages with catastrophic potential due to the aircraft design. Talking about AF poor maintenance isn't gonna demonstrate that BA wasn't exposed to any risks.

[ATC Watcher]

M2dude.
A very concise and a correct recap of the facts so far .
just a couple of corrections ( based on published documents I have seen )

2.An ommited spacer on the front L/H bogie had resulted in massive distortion in the geometry of the front wheels on this U/C

I have not seen the words " massive distrortion " anywhere so far.

3.Eye witnesses (including 2 French airport firefighters, the closest of all to the A/C) categorilcaly stated that they saw smoke and flames eminating from the L/H U/C long before 'the titanium strip'

It is actually 3 firefighters ( evidence presented to the tribunal ) and they state smoke and fire started between exits S5 and S6 , so about 500-700 m before the position in the BEA report.( but the FDR transcript does not show/record any abnormality at that time )

When the A/C was only running on 3 full thrust producing engines

It was only 2 a full thrust , the 3rd one had irregular thrust , so they were in fact at 2,5 engines, an irrecoverable situation at that speed.

[stickyb]

M2Dude - Thank you for your summary. Let me state straight away I am not a pilot, just an interested observer with no ulterior motive. I would like to ask you one question, and that is : Do you think your summary will be aired in court?

[B Fraser]

#2 engine was shut down by the F/E strictly against SOPs

Please can you explain ? The crew were alerted to a fire by ATC and acted upon the information presented to them. #2 engine was behaving abnormally although not on fire. Was there other information available to the crew that should have directed them to a different course of action ?

On a separate point, it has been claimed that the shape of the edge of the titanium strip is a match to the lump of rubber that was left on the runway. Allegedly, the strip was kept in the safe belonging to the mayor who has jurisdiction over CDG. Very peculiar.

[Chronus]

concorde crash

Could I invite comment restricted to only the following question:

What would have been the outcome had there not been FOD, would the aircraft returned to terra firma without the loss of life and property ?

[chuks]

I think that the CVR (Cockpit Voice Recorder) shows that the FE (Flight Engineer) shut down that engine on his own, without an order to do so from the Captain. The argument is that if it had been left running then it should have still been producing useful power, that shutting it down contributed to the crash.

I don't know the specifics of the Air France SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures) for this but I think that usually an engine is only shut down on the order of the Captain, using two-crew procedures. Something like:

FE: "Confirm shut down Number Two engine?"

Captain: "Confirm," etcetera. This protects against shutting down the wrong engine or as here, shutting down an engine that the Captain may wish to keep running.

Oddly enough, one may keep an engine that is on fire running after take-off. The logic is that you are using it to climb to a safe height, after which you may shut it down. The fire itself is not the main problem if you are at risk of crashing due to lack of performance or loss of control (both engines out on one side is much harder to control than one out and one on fire, for instance).

The counter-argument will probably be that there was no time for two-crew procedures so that the FE felt that he had to act on his own to deal with the reported fire as the greater risk to the aircraft. With hindsight, that might have been an obvious mistake on his part if the aircraft was not already unable to continue flight.

[chuks]

It depends...

If a pilot or an engineer said something about what they saw in regard to an aircraft accident then you would give that a lot more credence than what your average citizen said, wouldn't you? Of course eyewitness testimony is always taken to be intrinsically unreliable but some eyewitnesses are more reliable than others.

An airport fireman has to be pretty credible when it comes to fire: sparks, smoke, flames and that sort of stuff are his area of expertise; while it isn't 100% absolutely established beyond any doubt it must be something that demands consideration, these reports about just where it was seen that this aircraft was showing the first signs of serious trouble.

[lomapaseo]

M2dude

1. The aircraft was highly over weight, taking off with a tailwind. The CG was way beyond the ABSOLUTE maximum for T/O of 54%, reduci9ng the effectiveness of nose wheel steering. (Particularly during the initial phase of the T/O roll).

2. An ommited spacer on the front L/H bogie had resulted in massive distortion in the geometry of the front wheels on this U/C. (Borne out by large amounts of R/H rudder application from the early to the very last satages of the T/O roll, with very little or no heading change. The trauma on the U/C was mitigated by rolling over an initial very rough runway surface, awaiting repair.

3. Eye witnesses (including 2 French airport firefighters, the closest of all to the A/C) categorilcaly stated that they saw smoke and flames eminating from the L/H U/C long before 'the titanium strip'.

The hydro-dynamics of the rupturing of the wing panel were like nothing ever experienced before, adding to the theory that this never was a simple tyre blowout,. There is an additional theory, not accepted by all that fuel tank #5 was being pressurised due to an illegal switch position. As tank 5 was directly feeding the ruptured #2 tank, the additional pressure of head plus pump pressure contributed to the hydo-dynamics of the event. This additional point however is not pivotal.

The A/C never achieved safe flying speed, on a day when the V2 was 220KTS, takeoff was at 201 knots, the maximum achieved IAS was 211 KTS. When the A/C was only running on 3 full thrust producing engines (#1 being seriously damaged by a runway light) #2 engine was shut down by the F/E strictly against SOPs. It was impossible for the A/C to remain flying after this.

Typical legal postulations (my bold above) that will be defeated immediately by expert witnesses. In the long run additional evidence beyond the BEA report may be introduced if supported by vetted experts. Then the case will be simplified down to non-expert judges interpreting the applicable law as it applies to fact vs opinion.

Much of what I read above is opinion and certainly the bolded words are only opinion by a non-expert

[SLFinAZ]

lompaseo,

Some of what your viewing as postulations do not appear to be so. I would submit that the airplanes weight and center of gravity are both easily calculatable as being beyond acceptable limits based on verifiable documentation and observation. The additional heat can be calculated with a reasonably high level of accuaracy (specific to the initial takeoff roll overrough surfaces) and that portion of the runway was already out of service for all other operations for documented reasons. So we have a certain amount of information that falls much closer to stipulated facts then to speculation.

Going further the FDR shows significant rudder input beyond the norm coupled with well below expected results for such an input. This would seem to demonstrate less then acceptable nose wheel steering performance initially as well as a clearly documentable problem with regard to the planes tracking. Since this deficiency predates both the tire blowout and impact with the runway debris it can be reasonably viewed as the 1st domino that fell. It is further possible to begin to calculate the additional heat and pressure added to that from the rough surface and normal operational stress.

So before you get to any consideration of the eyewutness (who would be deemed as expert witnesses acting in a professional capacity in a US court) you have a significant measure of forensic evidence that documents both heat and lateral stress beyond the anticipated load and the rating on the tires. Placed in the context of the historical issues predating the event which document a minimal margin of safty it is perfectly reasonable to conclude that the combination of takeoff configuration, local conditions (wind, runway surface etc) and the combined lateral stress and heat do to the combination of alignment and torque from the control surface input.

In effect all the required holes the moment the takeoff roll started. This leads us to the biggest flaw in the french legal system. In the US and British system the judge acts as the administrative function in applying the law. The role of the jury is to resolve any issue of truth as it relates to the facts. Here the administrative panel determines what "the truth" is. Any reasonable person with a high school education can really determine that this accident was decades in the making and that combination of circumstances reflects entirely on the airline and its operational and flight procedures. Viewed from this perspective the total absense of AF as a defendent points clearly to a political coverup at the highest level.

[wings folded]

This leads us to the biggest flaw in the french legal system. In the US and British system the judge acts as the administrative function in applying the law. The role of the jury is to resolve any issue of truth as it relates to the facts. Here the administrative panel determines what "the truth" is. Any reasonable person with a high school education can really determine that this accident was decades in the making and that combination of circumstances reflects entirely on the airline and its operational and flight procedures. Viewed from this perspective the total absense of AF as a defendent points clearly to a political coverup at the highest level.

Why do you not pop over to France and share all of your knowledge with the court?

Bring all your friends with a high school education.

The French courts are begging to be educated by wiser sources than those available to them. I sense that you feel you can plug the gap.

Were you so interested in the case of AZF?

The procedure was the same but in a diffferent locality.

There were numerous deaths.

As it happens there was no US individual nor corporation involved.

So it was not much reported in the US.

[SLFinAZ]

I take issue with any tribunal that utilizes it's administrative arm to determine issues of fact. If we look exclusively to the BEA report we can identify a couple of points of curiousity. The maximum gross weight is significantly reduced for an 8 knt tailwind entirely due to tire concerns. However the results of the overweight status (seperate from the late bags) is viewed an unimportant....yet we had a tire failure?.

Of the 57 documented failures 19 are specific to debris yet we had no preflight inspection for debris...even though both previous experience and engineering study showed both a very low safety margin and an abnormally high potential for catostophic failure in the vent of an incident. The prefight captains brief focuses on tire failure procedures and outlines options but at no time in the CVR is the tire failure mentioned or is a warning triggered by any sensor.

Based on the captains brief I'd expect an intricate sensor system monitoring tire pressure, temp etc that would have indicated a tire failure? The tremendous focus specific to potential tire failure prior to takeoff indicates how serious the issue is and begs the fundemental question on why a takeoff roll that exceeded the tires maximum certified performance threshold was even initiated?

So to me the real question/observation is that the proceedings have been artificially restricted to ignore very real and significant oversights that led directly to the crash. The argument that FOD was the direct cause and not coinsidental is unprovable within the context that the tire was being operated outside of its maximum certified perfromance envelope and that a significant history of failue within that envelope is documented in the absense of FOD. Further the failure to inspect the runway prior to every concorde takeoff is absurdly irresponsible given the potentially catostrophic outcome that was statistically unavoidable over a large enough sample set. In fact every effort appears to be in place to prevent an honest and objective review. The real three questions are simple...

1) Why was the runway not inspected
2) Why was the plane allowed to depart when "out of spec"
3) Why would a portion of runway unsuitable for standard operations be used for a plane with such potentially dangerous tire issues.

While a panel of administrative judges may very well discount these questions a jury (even a French one) is much more apt to contemplate these issues honestly. Jury nulification is the very real counterbalance to administrative judicial process that can place the "letter of the law" over the spirit of the law.

[captplaystation]

SLFin AZ,

I won't agree with all of your points just because we are the same age I will agree because I think they are well made.

On an anecdotal note, given the high stresses placed on the tires/tyres courtesy of the delta wing & the speed required to get airborne, I was always slightly surprised in CDG at the speed this projectile used to whistle past me on the taxiway as it made it's way to the holding point.
Yet again, I would suggest, a slight problem with carrying enough fuel, had perhaps a less than subtle influence on the priorities of the crew operating this ship. Maybe an over simplification of course, but an unconscious tendency to compensate for tight margins (ignoring excess baggage/squeezing extra fuel in "somehow" /exagerating taxi fuel to allow same/ taxying fast/ failing to allow for tailwind) may have become unwritten /unspoken S.O.P.'s on this fleet in this company ?
That will be a very difficult one to fish out in a court of law, even if it may have been the case.

[S.F.L.Y]

Further the failure to inspect the runway prior to every concorde takeoff is absurdly irresponsible given the potentially catostrophic outcome that was statistically unavoidable over a large enough sample set.

When you need to inspect the runway before each takeoff due to potentially catastrophic outcomes it's probably that something is wrong with the aircraft itself. Maybe M2dude can confirm if BA had such mandatory inspections in its SOPs?

The aircraft was highly over weight, taking off with a tailwind.

The aircraft's takeoff weight has been estimated between 185.598 kg and 186.251 kg. The MTOW was 185.070. At that point it is not exactly "highly" overweight and mainly depend on the reference used to calculate passengers weights. By using the 76 kg per pax you get 185.598 kg, 528kg above MTOW.

The restriction on weight comes from the tailwind which involves an increased ground roll speed. Tires have a maximum roll speed based on aircraft's weight. In case of tailwind the takeoff weight has to be reduced to a lower limit in order not to exceed the tires max speed. With an 8 kts tailwind the MTOW becomes 180.300 due to this tire speed limit. At this stage I want to make 2 comments:

1- The wind given by the tower was measured on the parallel runway (26L). The average wind (over 2 minutes) on this threshold was 090/03 while at the opposite runway end (08) the wind was 320/03. Despite the crew's decision to takeoff with the reported wind, it's very improbable that the aircraft actually encountered 8 kts of tailwind at the end of its takeoff roll.

2- Since the tire got burst well before reaching its rolling speed limitation, it is quite clear that exceeding an eventual tailwind MTOW limitation didn't play any role in the accident. By the time the tire was destructed, the aircraft wasn't exceeding its rolling speed limitation.

The CG was way beyond the ABSOLUTE maximum for T/O of 54%

The CG was announced at 54% following fuel transfer before takeoff.

[Machaca]

When you need to inspect the runway before each takeoff due to potentially catastrophic outcomes it's probably that something is wrong with the aircraft itself.

Quite an obtuse judgment. Nothing wrong at all -- different ops for different equipment for different missions.

has been estimated

was measured

was announced

According to who/what? Surely you're not going to blindly defend AF with only the filtered details contained within the BEA report?!

[DERG]

Remarkable

"Any reasonable person with a high school education can really determine that this accident was decades in the making and that combination of circumstances reflects entirely on the airline and its operational and flight procedures. Viewed from this perspective the total absense of AF as a defendent points clearly to a political coverup at the highest level."

I agree.