What to expect from the Concorde trial ?
A French court starts the final phase of the Concorde trial today. The hearings are planned to last for four months, after eight years of investigation. The families of the victims will play a secondary role only, as most of them have been “compensated for their losses” by AirFrance. This wording is awful, isn’t it ? Anyway, that’s not the point.
The favorite hypothesis is that a titanium blade fallen from a Continental aircraft which took-off before Concorde damaged a tire. A piece of rubber supposedly hit the wing, damaged a fuel tank, causing the fire which lead to the loss of the aircraft. Lawyers are still in action, and at least the French speaking media are full of speculations.
The AirFrance strategy seems to be to point towards Continental, using the “no blade – no crash” theory. One of Continental’s lawyer said that he intends to “use the hearings to demonstrate things that the experts did not understand so far…”. There are lots of eye-witnesses: airport firemen, other crews, passengers, and lots of non-aviation oriented persons. Some pretend that the fire started well before the aircraft rolled over supposed place of the titanium blade and other theories will certainly be discussed.
I’m not sure what to expect from this trial. The BEA (French equivalent of the NTSB) published its report years ago (check the Aviation Accidents page for more details) and as all aviation investigation report, it aims at establishing facts, not responsibilities. This is the role of the court, and given the amount of money that such cases involve, the pressure quite high.
My crystal ball is undergoing maintenance, so I can’t say anything about the direction the court will follow, but I can imagine several scenarios:
- Bad hair day – Nobody’s guilty. As we say in French, “la faute à pas de chance”. Unpredictable circumstances, no faults, no sentence. Given the human price of this accident, this seems unlikely.
- Scapegoat – Look away everybody! An obscure mechanic, preferably retired, will be blamed for the whole thing. The whole settlement will then depend upon the employer of that unfortunate person.
- 50 / 50 – Everybody’s happy. Shared responsibility between Continental and AirFrance, and may by Concorde’s manufacturer, and the tires manufacturer. When no one is innocent, no one is really guilty, isn’t it ?
- La surprise du Chef – Chief’s surprise. Courts can make issue surprising rulings, and this case is complex enough to leave lot of room for a surprise, which I can’t anticipate, by definition…
I’ll keep an eye on this trial and will surely post here again with news when they will break out. In the mean time… hypothesis anybody ?
4 Comments, Comment or Ping
Ron
Although I am no fan of the French, their name really should be capitalized.
Feb 2nd, 2010
Mark
What to expect, as you say, who knows.
Personally of the opinion it should be the ‘bad hair day’ outcome, otherwise known as misadventure. Yes there is a duty of care, but sometimes things go wrong beyond what can be forseen despite best efforts; unless someone is negligent, there should not be a case to answer. Sometimes bad things happen to good people. There is not always someone to blame – who do we sue for the suffering in Haiti?
I’m inclined to think that continental is irrelevant – whatever the cause, sometimes tyres/tires burst. The a/c should be able to take that – this time it didn’t, outrageous circumstance? Already we have a culture where people are warned not to clear the snow from their paths because if they do, and someone slips, they could be sued (I’m not making this up). How long before we grind to a complete standstill, afraid of doing anything?
Feb 2nd, 2010
Sylvia
I’m looking forward to seeing the results but the nature of the trial makes me feel that the outcome will be less than satisfactory. It shouldn’t be about blame but about what can be done (if anything) to avoid such situations – so really, a question of unpredictable circumstance or avoidable sequence of events? I’m not a fan of hand-waving away the problems and I think accident investigations have proven their value in the past. But I don’t have high hopes for this one.
Feb 3rd, 2010
Fernando
I’m with Sylvia, this should not be about blame. Anytime you start undergoing criminal proceedings in what was clearly an accident (regardless of who ends up getting the blame), you are seriously undermining safety. In future accidents, if pilots know they might end up in jail for telling the truth about a mistake they may have done, they may just lie a bit to accident investigators about the things that the investigators can’t figure out from the evidence. Accident investigation needs to be a process in which pilots can feel free to discuss what happened. Most of the time accidents are just that… accidents. There are very few cases in which criminal intent was behind a crash and if an investigation determines that there was some intent behind a crash, THEN it should go to trail. Otherwise, you’re just putting aviation safety on the line.
Blaming Continental is just reaching a bit far, even if a piece did fall out of the earlier plane. Why not blame airport authorities for not checking the runway before every takeoff? Or France’s transportation ministry for not requiring the runway checks? Or the prime minister then for not requiring the transportation ministry to require the checks of runways? If these seem ridiculous, it is because they are and so is criminally blaming Continental and its CEO (amongst others) for what was clearly an accident no one intended.
Feb 8th, 2010
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