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 THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE CONCORDE DISASTER

 

Makes fascinating reading......at last a comprehensive account

 THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE CONCORDE DISASTER

 

 

Take a Chance, Fly Air France

 

 

THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE CONCORDE DISASTER

December 9, 2012

LAST WEEK, A FRENCH APPEALS COURT overturned a manslaughter 

conviction against Continental Airlines for its role in the crash of an 
Air France Concorde outside Paris twelve years ago.

Flight 4590 was a charter destined for New York ’s JFK airport on 

July 25th, 2000, carrying mostly 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 tires to burst.. The strip had 
fallen from the underside of a Continental Airlines DC-10 that had 
departed minutes earlier, bound for Houston .. Chunks of the burst tire 
impacted the Concorde’s wing at tremendous velocity, resulting in a 
powerful 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 the crippled jet into the air, but lost control 

moments later, slamming into a hotel. All 109 passengers and crew 
perished, as did four people on the ground.

All along, conventional wisdom, bolstered by lethargic media 

coverage, has held that the fuel tank fire was the direct cause of the 
crash. This from the Associated Press a few days ago, is a typical 
example of what the public has been reading and hearing: “The burst 
tire sent bits of rubber flying, puncturing the fuel tanks, which 
started the fire that brought down the plane.”

But this isn’t so. 

There’s no denying the jet ran over an errant piece of metal that 

caused a tire explosion and a resultant fire. But while the fire was 
visually spectacular — caught on camera, it trails behind the plane in 
a hellish rooster tail — experts say that aside from damaging the 
number 2 engine, it was very much survivable, and likely would have 
burned itself out in a matter of a few minutes. Not only was it 
survivable, but it was probably avoidable as well, had it not been for 
a chain of errors and oversights that, to date, nobody wants to talk 
about — particularly not European investigators.

The plane went down not because of any fire, directly, but because 

1., it was flying too slowly; 2., it was several tons overweight and 
beyond its aft centre of gravity limit; 3., two of its four engines 
were damaged or erroneously shut down; 4., it was over-fuelled. 

It was flying too slowly because the pilot at the controls, 

Christian Marty, had pulled the jet into the air to avoid skidding 
sideways off the runway and colliding with another plane. Why it was 
skidding has been the subject of contention, but as we’ll see in a 
minute, many believe the skid was caused by an improperly repaired 
landing gear. 

Under normal circumstances Marty still had enough speed to climb 

away safely; however, he no longer had enough power. One engine had 
been badly damaged due to ingestion of foreign material — not only 
pieces of exploded tire, but debris from a runway edge 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 and altitude when 
he was not supposed to do this, when remaining thrust from that engine 
was desperately needed for survival.

All the while, the plane was an estimated six tons above its maximum 

allowable weight based on weather conditions at the time of the crash.

At proper weight, the jet would have become airborne prior to the 

point when it ran over the metal strip. Further, the fuel tank that was 
struck by tire debris had been over-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 for up to 98% 
capacity under certain conditions. The tank on the ill-fated flight was 
filled to 100%, leaving no space for compression. Fuel itself will not 
compress, so when debris struck the tank, it resulted in a shock wave 
that caused a puncture — in a location several meters away from the 
point of impact.

The November 29th verdict was, if nothing else, fair. “ France is 

one of a handful of countries that 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, aviation safety specialists were highly critical of 
the suit, believing (as I do), that such prosecutions set a dangerous 
and destructive precedent, undermining crash investigations and air 
safety in general. “The aviation safety community is going to view this 
verdict with great deal of relief,” said William R. Voss, president of 
the Flight Safety Foundation, speaking in the Times article. “It 
reminds us that 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 story that ran in the British newspaper The 

Observer in 2005. It’s seldom that I have flattering things to say 
about the press’s coverage of aviation accidents, but this particular 
piece, by reporter David Rose, is a gripping, startling story.

A link to the full article is here. In addition, below, is a 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 

on 25 July 2000, at the moment Concorde became a technological Icarus. 
The great white bird rears up over runway 26 at Charles de Gaulle, 
immediately after takeoff. Already mortally wounded, flames bleed 
uncontrollably from beneath the left-hand wing. Less than two minutes 
later, the world’s only supersonic airliner will fling itself into the 
Paris suburb of Gonesse, killing all 109 on board 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 out when the plane passed over a strip of metal on the runway. A 
tyre burst; a chunk of rubber thudded into a fuel tank inside the wing; 
jet fuel poured out of a hole and ignited.

The hot gases caused two of the engines to falter, and despite a 

valiant struggle by Captain Christian Marty, a daredevil skier who once 
crossed the Atlantic on a windsurf board, the loss of thrust made the 
crash inevitable.

An investigation by The Observer suggests the truth is much more 

complicated. In the words of John Hutchinson, a Concorde captain for 15 
years, the fire on its own should have been “eminently survivable; the 
pilot should have been able to fly his way out of trouble.” The reason 
why he failed to do so, Hutchinson believes, was a lethal combination 
of operational error and negligence. This appears to have been a crash 
with more than 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 first lady of France , returning from the 
G7 summit.

Concorde looks to be nearby because it had been close to hitting the 

747, an event which would have turned both aircraft into a giant 
fireball. Veering wildly to the left, like a recalcitrant supermarket 
trolley with a jammed wheel, Concorde’s undercarriage had locked askew.

When Marty pulled back on the control column to raise the nose and 

take to the air — the process pilots call “rotation” — the plane’s 
airspeed was only 188 knots, 11 knots below the minimum recommended 
velocity required for this manoeuvre.

But he had no choice: the plane was about to leave the tarmac 

altogether and plough into the soft and bumpy grass at its side. That 
might have ripped off the landing gear, leaving Concorde to overturn 
and blow up on its own. If not, the 747 lay straight ahead. So he took 
to the air, although he knew he was travelling too slowly, which would 
impair the damaged plane’s chances of survival.

Shocking evidence now emerging suggests that the Air France Concorde 

F-BTSC had not been properly maintained. The airline’s ground staff had 
failed to replace a “spacer” — a vital component of the landing gear 
which keeps the wheels in proper alignment. Although the BEA disputes 
it, there is compelling evidence that it was the missing spacer which 
may have caused the plane to skew to the left, so forcing Marty to 
leave the ground too early.

At the same time, the plane was operating outside its legally 

certified limits. When it stood at the end of the runway, ready to 
roll, it was more than six tonnes over its approved maximum takeoff 
weight for the given conditions, with its centre of gravity pushed 
dangerously far to the rear. Even before the blowout, Marty was already 
pushing the envelope.

The stresses on Concorde’s landing gear are unusually severe. At 

regular intervals, the various load-bearing components become “lifed” 
and must be replaced. When the undercarriage bogeys are taken apart and 
reassembled, the work must be done according to a rigid formula, and 
rigorously inspected and assessed.

Concorde F-BTSC went into the hangar at Charles de Gaulle on 18 

July, a week 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. In the middle is a low-friction pivot which 
connects the beam to the vertical leg extending down from inside the 
wing. The bits of the pivot which bear the load are two steel shear 
bushes. To keep them in position, they are separated by the spacer: a 
piece of grey, anodised aluminium about five inches in diameter and 
twelve inches long. When the plane left the hangar on 21 July, the 
spacer was missing. After the crash, it was found in the Air France 
workshop, still attached to the old beam which had been replaced.

In the days before the accident, the aircraft flew to New York and 

back twice. 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 should have 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 a snug-fitting pivot, the 
beam and the wheels were wobbling, with about three degrees of movement 
possible in any direction. As the plane taxied to the start of the 
runway, there was nothing to keep the front wheels of the undercarriage 
in line with the back. The supermarket trolley was ready to jam.

Exactly when it started to do so is uncertain. Jean-Marie Chauve, 

who flew Concordes with Air France until his retirement, and Michel 
Suaud, for many years a Concorde flight engineer, believe the 
undercarriage was already out of alignment when the plane began to move 
down the runway.

They have spent the past six months preparing a 60-page report on 

the crash. Chauve said: “The acceleration was abnormally slow from the 
start. There was something retarding the aircraft, holding it back.” 
Chauve and Suaud’s report contains detailed calculations which conclude 
that without this retardation, the plane would have taken off 1,694 
metres from the start of the runway — before reaching the fateful metal 
strip.

The BEA contests these findings, saying that the acceleration was 

normal until the tyre burst. It also maintains that even after the 
blowout, the missing spacer was insignificant.

The BEA’s critics say that once the tyre burst, the load on the 

three remaining tyres became uneven, and even if the wheels had been 
more or less straight before, they now twisted disastrously to the 
side. The smoking gun is a remarkable series of photographs in the BEA’
s own preliminary report. They show unmistakably the skid marks of four 
tyres, heading off the runway on to its concrete shoulder, almost 
reaching the rough grass beyond.

In one picture, the foreground depicts a smashed yellow steel 

landing light on the very edge of the made-up surface, which was 
clipped by the aircraft as Marty tried to wrest it into the air. 
Industry sources have confirmed that this probably had further, 
damaging results. Until then the number one engine had been functioning 
almost normally but when the plane hit the 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 clearly skids.”

In its interim report, and in a statement, the BEA said that the 

leftwards yaw was caused not by the faulty landing gear but by “the 
loss of thrust from engines one and two”.

There are several problems with this analysis. First, as the BEA’s 

own published data reveals, the thrust from engine one was almost 
normal until the end of the skid, when it took in the parts of the 
landing light. It is simply not true that the yaw began when both 
engines failed.

Second, those who fly the plane say that a loss of engine power will 

not cause an uncontrollable yaw. The Observer has spoken to five former 
and serving Concorde captains and flying officers. All have repeatedly 
experienced the loss of an engine shortly before takeoff 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 deal 
at all. You’re not using anything like the full amount of rudder to 
keep the plane straight; the yaw is totally containable.”

Other avoidable factors were further loading the dice, making it 

still more difficult to rescue the plane. When Marty paused at the 
start of the runway, his instruments told him that his Concorde had 1.2 
tonnes of extra fuel which should have been burnt during the taxi. In 
addition, it contained 19 bags of luggage which were not included on 
the manifest, and had been loaded at the last minute, weighing a 
further 500 kg. These took the total mass to about 186 tonnes — a tonne 
above the aircraft’s certified maximum structural weight.

Meanwhile, in the interval between Concorde’s leaving the terminal 

and reaching the start of the runway, something very important had 
changed: the wind. It had been still. Now, as the control tower told 
Marty, he had an eight-knot tailwind. The first thing pilots learn is 
that one takes off against the wind. Yet as the voice record makes 
clear, Marty and his crew seemed not to react to this information at 
all.

Had they paused for a moment, they might have recomputed the data on 

which they had planned their takeoff. If they had, they would have 
learnt a very worrying fact. The tailwind meant that Concorde’s runway-
allowable takeoff weight was just 180 tonnes — at least six tonnes less 
than the weight of Flight 4590.

[NOTE: What the reporter is saying here is that once the tailwind 

was accounted for, the plane was now six tons above the takeoff limit 
for that runway.]

John Hutchinson said: “The change in the wind was an incredible 

revelation, and no one says anything. Marty should have done the sums 
and told the tower, ‘Hang on, we’ve got to redo our calculations.’”

The extra weight had a further consequence beyond simply making it 

harder to get into the air. It shifted the centre of gravity backwards: 
the extra bags almost certainly went into the rear hold, and all the 
extra fuel was in the rearmost tank.

A plane’s centre of gravity is expressed as a percentage: so many 

per cent fore or aft. Brian Trubshaw and John Cochrane, Concorde’s two 
test pilots when the aircraft was being developed in the early 1970s, 
set the aft operating limit at 54 per cent — beyond that, they found, 
it risked becoming uncontrollable, likely to rear up backwards and 
crash, exactly as Flight 4590 did in its final moments over Gonesse.

The doomed plane’s centre of gravity went beyond 54 per cent. The 

BEA states a figure of 54.2 per cent. A senior industry source, who 
cannot be named for contractual reasons, says the true figure may have 
been worse: with the extra fuel and bags, it may have been up to 54.6 
per cent. And as the fuel gushed from the hole in the forward tank, the 
centre of gravity moved still further back.

When the plane was just 25 feet off the ground, Gilles Jardinaud, 

the flight engineer, shut down the ailing number two engine. Both 
French and British pilots say it was another disastrous mistake, which 
breached all set procedures. The engine itself was not on fire, and as 
the tank emptied and the fire burnt itself out, it would probably have 
recovered. The fixed drill for shutting down an engine requires the 
crew to wait until the flight is stable at 400 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, 

John Hutchinson said: “Discipline had broken down. The captain doesn’t 
know what’s happening; the co-pilot doesn’t know; it’s a shambles.”

Previous reports of the tragedy have described the crash as an act 

of God, a freak occurrence which exposed a fatal structural weakness in 
the aircraft which could have appeared at any time. The investigation 
by The Observer suggests the truth may not only be more complicated, 
but also sadder, more sordid. Men, not God, caused Concorde to crash, 
and their omissions and errors may have turned an escapable mishap into 
catastrophe.

The issues raised by David Rose, which at first were dismissed as so 

much conspiracy mongering, are now generally accepted facts within the 
aviation community, and have been more or less confirmed by 
investigators, however quietly. The November, 2012 court ruling does 
not explicitly says so, but it is, in its own way, a tacit 
acknowledgment of the full story — one in which Continental Airlines 
played at worst a supporting role. This accident is an outstanding 
example of something we’ve seen time and time again in airplane 
crashes: multiple errors, none of them necessarily fatal on their own 
accord, combining and compounding at the worst possible moment to 
precipitate a catastrophe. Rarely is the cause of disaster something 
simple and unambiguous..

Both British Airways and Air France, the only two operators of the 

Concorde, grounded their fleets following the 2000 disaster. The planes 
were reintroduced following a fuel-tank redesign, but both carriers 
withdrew them from service permanently in 2003, after 27 years of 
service, citing prohibitively expensive operating and upkeep costs. 
Only twenty Concordes had been built, four of which were prototypes or 
pre-production examples. The Air France crash marked its only fatal 
accident.

Concorde, as you may or may not know, was not the only supersonic 

passenger aircraft. There was also its Soviet cousin, the Tupolev Tu-
144, which also suffered a single fatal accident over the brief course 
of its commercial tenure. In 1973 a Tu-144 crashed during a 
demonstration at the Paris Air Show. The Tupolev had taken off from Le 
Bourget airport, where Captain Marty and his crew were attempting an 
emergency landing when their Concorde went down in 2000.

DEFINITELY give this one a read!!  And the attached article by 

Patrick Smith.

Concorde

 

Excerpt from the Travel Insider newsletter

The Real Truth of Air France’s Concorde Disaster

The French have this strange approach whereby, in an accident, they 

like to find someone to blame and bring a criminal prosecution against 
them.

Never mind that the key part of an accident is the lack of what the 

attorneys would term mens rea – the lack of a specific decision on the 
part of someone to create the accident. If an accident was intentional, 
it wouldn’t be an accident, would it. But the French like to find 
someone they can blame.

Never mind also that when there is criminal prosecution being 

threatened, people tend to clam up and stop being fully open and 
truthful about what happened, which means it becomes harder to learn 
from the innocent and unfortunate mistakes and chain of events that may 
have caused any such accident. This is why, just about everywhere else 
in the world, air accidents in particular are investigated without the 
threat of criminal prosecution hanging over the heads of the involved 
parties.

Oh – the French also being the ardent nationalists that they are, 

any attempt to shift blame from French companies and individuals, and 
to pass it over to foreigners instead (ideally Americans, British, or 
Germans) is eagerly sought. This can sometimes be difficult to do – for 
example the AF 449 crash over the Atlantic a couple of years ago, 
involving Air France (obviously French), its pilots (also French) and 
an Airbus plane (also, ooops, mainly French).

So with all this as background, do you remember the terrible tragedy 

of the Air France Concorde that crashed when taking off from Paris back 
in 2000? After casting around, the French decided that clearly the 
fault for the crash of an Air France (French) Concorde (half French) 
piloted by French pilots and leaving from a French airport should be 
blamed on Continental Airlines, a nasty American company.

The logic of that is rather breathtaking, and involved a very 

selective inattention to most of the relevant details of the disaster. 
The story went that a Continental DC-10 that took off shortly before 
the Concorde had a piece of metal fall off and lie on the runway, which 
became the root cause of the Concorde disaster. The Concorde apparently 
rolled over the top of the metal piece, which apparently then punctured 
a tire, and bits of rubber flew off the tire and into a fuel tank, 
starting a fire.

At least this was better than their earlier attempt to prosecute, 

and if successful, imprison an 80 yr old gentleman who was the original 
designers of the Concorde, who had been in charge of the plane’s 
initial testing program more than 40 years before the crash.

The successful prosecution of Continental has now been semi-

overturned in a French Appeals court, which has at least absolved 
Continental of criminal liability, while still imposing a very small 
(€1 million) measure of civil liability. Indeed, the amount is so 
ridiculously small, compared to the cost to Air France of losing a 
Concorde full of passengers, that it begs the question ‘why so little’? 
It is almost as though the court is saying ‘Okay, the honor of France 
is at stake, so we’ll find you guilty, but don’t worry, we’ll just 
impose the tiniest of fines’.

If Continental truly was guilty, surely its fine, for the loss of a 

plane and the death of 113 people, should have been more like €250 
million..

Details here.

However, none of this relates to the real true full story of how and 

why the Concorde crashed. It is a story worth telling, because it 
reveals sad negligence and incompetence on the part of – gulp – French 
people in many different parts of the tragedy.

I’d found an article about this, many years ago, and even mentioned 

it in passing in earlier commentaries on the accident, but lost the 
link and couldn’t find it again, no matter how hard I searched. So 
great thanks to ‘Ask the Pilot’ blogger Patrick Smith, who now shares 
this excellent must-read article.

Not to steal the story from Patrick and the sources he draws from, 

but the spectacular fire was not fatal. It was something the pilots 
should have been able to recover from. Now go read his story to find 
out the multiple problems with the plane to start with, and the 
ineptness of the pilots’ responses after the fire started and how the 
combination of these factors, rather than the fire, caused the plane’s 
destruction.

Excuse me for maybe having a misplaced set of priorities, but to me 

the biggest tragedy of all about the unnecessary and preventable Air 
France Concorde crash was not just the death of 113 people and the loss 
of an irreplaceable Concorde. It was that this crash ended the aura of 
the Concorde’s impeccable safety record and claimed highest standards 
of everything; and – in my opinion – was the underlying root cause of 
the Concordes being unnecessarily taken out of service only a few years 
after they were returned to service after the crash. Indeed, Air France 
’s embarrassment was so great that it reportedly never wished to 
operate them again after their accident.

Do read Patrick Smith’s very clear explanation of what went wrong, 

and how easily preventable the entire tragedy could have and should 
have been.

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