Burst tyre behind Concorde crash-report
 

<a href="http://uk.news.yahoo.com/020116/80/cpfs6.html" target="_blank">http://uk.news.yahoo.com/020116/80/cpfs6.html</a>

PARIS (Reuters) - French investigators have issued a summary of their final report into the causes of the July 2000 Concorde air disaster, reaffirming their previous conclusions that the crash was triggered by a burst tyre.


But Air France on Wednesday denied a newspaper report that it had been singled out for fresh criticism in a fuller version of the report on the crash which killed 113 people.


French newspaper Liberation reported that the full text of the findings by the BEA aviation security body also noted various failings by Concorde operator Air France, while stressing these were not related to the crash.


The BEA was not immediately available for comment.


An Air France spokesman said there was nothing new in the final version of the report, but that authorities had made various recommendations which had mostly been implemented.


Concorde, the world's fastest passenger jet, re-entered service last November after its suspension following the crash shortly after take-off from Charles de Gaulle airport.


In a summary statement, the BEA confirmed its conclusions from an interim report that the front tyre of the aircraft ran over a strip of metal left on the runway.


The debris was thrown against the wing structure leading to a rupture of a fuel tank and a fire that broke out under the left wing of the aircraft.


Citing what it said was the unpublished full report, Liberation newspaper reported that BEA noted "several dysfunctions" in Air France's operation of the aircraft, "for example the use of certain outdated data in the initial phase of flight preparation and incomplete baggage handling".


"There is nothing new in this report," the Air France spokesman said. "An audit of company procedures was conducted last summer, recommendations were made, and most of those recommendations have already been put in place."

"There is nothing new in this report...."

Exactly - what about all the other supposed contributary factors discussed on this forum from various sources over several months....

<img src="confused.gif" border="0">

They are now all officially classified as rubbish because they have not contributed in any substantial way to the accident.

It's maybe a lesson to those who believe that you can only properly fly a plane if you use the same language as the manufacturer's manual, i.e; English...

Besides, Concorde -as well as Airbus planes- has a FRENCH official operating Manual. For Airbus is even goes so far that the English version is nothing more then just a translated copy! Wouldn't it be time to simplify things and start using French on all Airbus flight decks all over the world? :)

The NTSB reports usually include a "survivability" aspect, with suggestions to improve such. Will the final BEA report include this?

The report has yet to be posted on the AAIB site so it may be premature to comment.

News reports however seem to indicate that the conclusion of the BEA is that airline, crew and manufacturer are blameless.

But that Continental airlines isn't.

It will be interesting to see how they explain the grossly overweight take-off, with a tailwind, defective undercarriage and the shutting down of an operating engine close to the ground. (all of course allegedley)

Why am I not surprised?

Hello all,

Bally, - this aint no offense, just looking for more info!! - could you post out your sources regarding what you said about the overweight T/O, defective undercarriage and tailwind during T/O? doesnt concorde allow T/O with up to 10Kt tailwind like other airliners? And, the only defect I was aware of was that of a Thrust reverser. Then, last, do you have the adress for this AAIB site you are talking about?

In advance, thanks.

More great journalism - BBC News 24 have just reported 'The final report into the crash exonerates the pilots, suggesting even if they had aborted the take off the undercarriage would have collapsed and the aircraft exploded'.
Next time I have to abort a take off I hope that doesn't happen.
They were of course referring to a runway overrun, but come on...

Some plausible answers to those so-called important questions:

-)the grossly overweight take-off:
If I understand it correctly we are talking here of something around one ton of overweight, which is less then 1% of the MTOW! Grossly is not really the correct word. Besides, with average weights for both pax, luggage and cargo, I wonder how many loadsheets showing us as loaded slightly below maximum take-off weight should actually show an overweight situation...

-)a tailwind departure:
Did you really think that as a pilot you are in a position to request for a more favourable rwy on mega-airports like CDG or LHR??

-)shutting down an operating engine close to the ground:
Remember the Concorde has 4 engines, which involves a different philosophy then on the more common twins in case of engine problems. Contrary to twins, here an engine may be shut down in case of a fire as soon as the plane is in a stable flight situation. When the flight engineer closed the engine, this definitely was the case...


I.S.O. asking for superhuman performances, knowledge and insights from the Concorde flight crew in order to fly their plane out of a catastrophe, we'd better spend our time on how it is possible that a US based airline flies transatlantic flights with a plane almost falling apart, parts wich were not even original and thus not certified!

tolipanebas

I am sorry but I have never read such an inaccurate, misleading and dangerously wrong post in a long time.

Not commenting on the Concorde incident because enough has been covered already but according to you it is OK to knowingly exceed MTOW because it is only a little bit over MTOW, take-off with a tailwind because the airport is busy and if you have a major failure it is OK for a crew member to ignore SOPs and do his/her own thing.

I cannot believe you are serious and if I had your cavalier and dangerous interpretation of the procedures for operating a commercial aircraft I am sure my flight management would have a word or two to say let alone my co-pilots.

God help us.

tolipanebas,

With the rubbish you spout, you should not be in charge of a bicycle nevermind a multimillion dollar aeroplane with passengers!

Hey folks!

Tailwind up to 10 kt. is within certification parameters for most airliners. And a 1% weight increment requires an increase in airspeeds by the square root of 1.01, not quite one half of one percent -- that would be a bit more than one whole knot.

All of which counts for patoouie when your wing burns off.

Anyway, actions speak louder than words. The fuel tanks and tires have been seriously upgraded since unless you send out sweepers before every Concorde movement, someday there's gonna be debris that you're gonna run over at something like Vr.

I think the real point that shouldn't be missed is that NO commercial airliner should be taken down by a tire burst. The real cause here is that there was a known problem where a tire coming apart could (and had in the past) cause a serious rupture in a fuel tank. This problem should have been fixed prior to the failure. It follows the same format as the Challenger accident. Every good engineer who knew of the problem felt that it would cause a catastrophic accident sooner or later.....and they were right

The previous thread
<a href="http://www.pprune.org/cgibin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=send_topic&t=015105&f=1" target="_blank">Here</a>
discusses this at some length and suggests that it was several tonns overweight for the conditions as well as a lot more. The question still remains;- How come these were glossed over?

It seems to me to be a bit like suggesting a car crash was caused by a burst tyre and ignoring the fact that the car was overloaded and taking part in a high speed chase whilst on fire.

For info :

The entire Final report is now available on the BEA's website. The English translation is avilable as a 12Mb PDF.

<a href="http://www.bea-fr.org/anglaise/actualite/concorde-en.htm" target="_blank">BEA Webpage</a>.

Lots of intersting comment; but it does say that the tyre bust was the cause and really not matter what else went on the burst and the resulting fire would have caused the aircraft to crash with the loss of all on board. This is due to the damaged the heavy fire was having on the systems and airframe.

An interting point is noted that if they hade decided to stop when the FE said "Stop" they would still have been at around 70kts. This is what was picked up by the media (BBC) as the report says that they whole aircraft would have been engulfed in flames due to the damage of a crash at 70kts and the level of fire that was present. A figure of 100kts is also talked of for an even later call to stop.

AF procedures for ground ops as expected do come in for pretty heavy pounding.

The report is worth the 12MB download as it does really explain what they understand to have gone on.

Of course Concorde may plan to take-off with a 10 kt tailwind - but only if the resulting RTOW has been correctly recalculated and proved to be inexcess of ATOW; V1 must also be recalculated.

Those who don't know understand the difference between ATOW, RTOW and MTOW on this thread should refresh themselves about scheduled performance. It is simple enough for anyone to 'back plot' the ATOW and to recompute the RTOW for the conditions at the time with the tailwind. GIVE US THE FIGURES!!

I really would like to meet the first airline pilot who has never done a overweight take-off in his life, be it unknowingly...

Remember that only average weights are used for most items on board, so figures like TOW=125.435kg on your final loadsheet are totally pointless; your real TOW could well be as low as 124.000kg or up to 127.000kg! Now, for flight preparation and planning this is not much of a problem, but if your certified MTOW is 126.000kg, then it might very well be that although according to your loadsheet you are ok to go, you are actually 1 ton overweight!
You see what I mean?

Now, 1.OOOkg may look a lot to most of you, but on a plane weighing 150ton, this is less then 1%!
It's exactly the same as having loaded 3kg too much on a Cessna 150...

Oh, before someone asks, no I have never ever seen a loadsheet where they take a margin on the MTOW to compensate for the inaccuracy of their approximations. If your certified MTOW is for instance 56.345kg, then they may/will load you up to that figure, notwithstanding all inaccurate average values used...

tolipanebas

You are really missing the point.

It is your cavalier assumptions which alarm me.

Yes it is possible that we are heavier than we ought to be on occasions (although checks are carried out to assess the accuracy of using aveage weights). But I would never ignore a weight limit intentionally.

You give the impression you would.

That is plain wrong.

tolipanebas

I'm afraid that your assumptions about the tolerances of overweight takeoffs do not apply to large delta wing supersonic transports.

The Captain is on the tape knowingly acknowledging that his aircraft is overweight for both the planned and also the unexpected tailwind takeoff case. He was in possession of all of the facts to enable him to make a safe decision and yet he conciously chose to ignore them.

Had I ever flown with you I would have been very seriously concerened over your attitude to aircraft limitations, but it would appear that we are unlikely ever to do so in the future. "Sabenapilot"

Un rafistolage Francais

q'est que c'est le mot en francais pour "whitewash"?

just asking, like.

Like many accidents, the cause that precipitated the incident MAY have been containable, were it not for other contributory factors.

Thus....

tailwind (fact)

overweight (fact) (and lets not forget, not only overweight but just over the edge on balance too)

missing spacer (fact)

.......whatever, when it came to the crunch they all added up.

8kts on the nose MIGHT have helped (eg may not have smashed runway light if airborne earlier, may not have even hit metal)

less weight MIGHT have helped, etc etc....

....of course we will never know, they may have made the crash even worse if it had come down elsewhere....

But the Moral? NEVER discount a contributory factor. Whatever the official report says, (& because of the speculation around this, one could be led to suspect that the findings may be biased in terms of shifting blame and liability) no-one can afford to be complacent "cos it's all fixed now".

Please think of that next time you have to weigh up requesting a backtrack against a downwind getaway....