Concorde Exec Quizzed On Crash

French authorities have opened a manslaughter case against the former head of the Concorde program in connection with a deadly crash of the supersonic jet, judicial officials said Tuesday.

Henri Perrier was placed under investigation — a step short of formal charges — late Monday for manslaughter and involuntary injury, the officials said on condition of anonymity because French law bars the disclosure of information from judicial investigations.

He is accused of knowing faults in the jet, but doing nothing to correct them, the BBC reports.

Perrier, chief engineer on the plane's first test flight in 1969 and head of the Concorde program in the 1980s and early 1990s, is the first person targeted in legal action over the crash. He was questioned by officials for nearly 12 hours on Monday and into early Tuesday.

He is the first of four former executives of Aerospatiale — a French plane maker now part of European Aeronautic Defence & Space Co. — summoned by investigating judge Christophe Regnard in the case. Two others are to be heard later this week. Three officials from France's civil aviation agency, DGAC, have also been called.

An Air France Concorde burst into flames just after takeoff from Paris' Charles de Gaulle airport on July 25, 2000, killing 109 people on board — mostly German tourists — and four people on the ground.

Two investigations — one by France's accident office, the other ordered by the prosecutors' office — concluded that a titanium "wear strip" that fell from a Continental Airlines DC-10 onto the runway had caused a Concorde tire to burst, propelling rubber debris that perforated the supersonic plane's fuel tanks.

Continental was placed under investigation in March for alleged manslaughter and involuntary injury. French prosecutors contend that the carrier had violated U.S. Federal Aviation Administration rules by using titanium in a part of the plane that normally called for use of aluminum, which is softer.

However, the judicial inquiry, made public last year, also determined that the jet's fuel tanks lacked sufficient protection from shock — a risk known since 1979.

According to that report, in the 60 cases of ruptured tires recorded since the Concorde entered service, seven led to a punctured tank. The needed reinforcement of the tanks only took place after the plane restarted service in November 2001, the report said.

The supersonic planes were flown commercially by Air France and British Airways, and were finally retired in 2003 amid ballooning costs and dwindling ticket sales.

Barely two years since the Condorde was retired, a European airline consortium — Airbus — said it is ready to plan launch of a new generation of supersonic travel jets. The group believes that "rapid growth in the aviation market means that by 2050 there could be demand for supersonic travel on hundreds of long-haul routes," London's Sunday Times reports. One researcher suggested last week that by 2050 supersonic travel could account for 10 to 20 percent of flights.