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 ?
