A French court today blamed a US airline and one of its mechanics for the crash of a Concorde airliner outside Paris in which 113 people died 10 years ago.
Continental Airlines and John Taylor were found guilty of involuntary manslaughter for safety failures on a DC10 aircraft that left debris on the runway before the supersonic Air France airliner took off in flames from Charles de Gaulle airport.
It crashed minutes later, and the disaster signalled the end of the first era of commercial supersonic flight.
Continental, now named United Continental Holdings following a merger, was ordered to pay Air France €1m (£846,946), and Taylor was fined €2,000.
Taylor was also given a 15-month suspended prison sentence. His supervisor and two European officials were acquitted, but after a four-month hearing earlier this year the court at Pontoise, north-west of Paris, ruled that the European aerospace group EADS bore some civil liability for the crash and must pay 30% of any damages to victims' families.
Investigators had said a titanium metal strip gashed the tyre of the Air France Concorde, propelling bits of rubber into the fuel tanks and sparking the fire. Most of the victims were German tourists, and four people on the ground were also killed.
Lawyers for Continental had suggested the Concorde was on fire before it hit the metal strip and said the airline was not to blame.
French officials had also faced charges for allegedly failing to fix weak spots on the Concorde after an inquiry by the country's aviation authority concluded that, while the crash could not have been predicted, the plane's fuel tanks were not sufficiently protected – a flaw that had been known about since 1979. Their lawyers said they were not to blame.
Most families of those who died have been compensated but Fenvac, a French association that represents victims of accidents and was a civil party in the case, said before the verdict that it had been "striking and shocking to see how the defendants were determined to avoid or play down any responsibility, citing probabilities, nuances of terminology, failing memory, obscure rules and other means of artifice".
A prosecutor had asked the court to fine Continental €175,000 and sought 18-month suspended prison sentences for Taylor and his now-retired supervisor, Stanley Ford.
The prosecution also requested a two-year suspended sentence for Henri Perrier, the former head of the Concorde programme at the plane maker Aérospatiale, and the acquittal of a French engineer, Jacques Herubel, and Claude Frantzen, the former chief of France's civil aviation authority.
Kenneth Quinn, an aviation lawyer and previously the chief counsel for the US Federal Aviation Authority, speaking before the verdict, said: "Criminal trials are the wrong response to accidents, because they are counterproductive when it comes to advancing safety and preventing accidents in the first place.
"The risk of facing a prosecutor some day chills voluntary disclosures and co-operation – it keeps people from coming forward to find, flag and fix safety issues, which hurts everyone".
Quinn, a partner at Washington-based lawyers Pillsbury: "Regardless of the trial's outcome, the fact it is merely taking place already takes us down a slippery slope to more 'criminalised' crash probes worldwide.
"Safety experts and regulators should lead investigations – not prosecutors – or else governments risk rolling back decades of progress by stifling safety cultures encouraging aviation professionals to come forward before it's too late". The Guardian
