World

Concorde Runway Inspection Delayed

August 15, 2000 / 10:26 AM EDT / CBS/AP

French investigators revealed a new piece Friday to the puzzle of the Concorde crash: The supersonic jet's runway was to be checked an hour before the flight, they said, but the inspection was bumped because of an airport fire drill.

The Concorde began its doomed flight at 4:42 p.m. on July 25. At the time it lifted off, the runway had not been inspected for more than 12 hours, investigators said.

The inspection delay did not violate any safety rules, and it was not immediately clear whether the delay had any bearing on how a mysterious metal strip ended up on the runway that day. Authorities have said the piece of metal gashed a tire on the plane, possibly triggering the chain of events that brought the Concorde down in flames in the town of Gonesse, killing 113 people.

"It is not yet established" how the metal part appeared on the runway, Paul-Louis Arslanian, chief of France's Accident and Inquiry Office, told a news conference Friday.

The Flight Transcript

The transcript of conversations between the control tower and pilots of Flight 4590 tends to back contentions that the plane caught fire when a piece of debris slammed into it.

He spoke the day after the office released a preliminary report on the first crash of the Concorde in its 24 years of commercial service. The highly technical 75-page report summed up the facts that have emerged so far.

In the report, investigators offered no conclusions and were careful not to point fingers. "We're only at the beginning," Arslanian said.

What the investigators have uncovered so far has raised as many questions as it has answered about the crash, which they believe was triggered by the metal strip's destruction of a forward tire on the left landing gear. But the biggest piece of new information to emerge Friday was the postponed runway inspection.

The Concorde used runway 26 at Paris' Charles de Gaulle airport. On the day of the crash, the first inspection there was carried out at 4:30 a.m.

A partial inspection was made at 2:30 p.m. because a plane was believed to have collided with a bird, but a second full inspection at 3 p.m. was postponed because of a drill involving the airport's firefighting crews, investigators said.

"We have to establish what was done during the firemen's exercise," Arslanian said.

Charles de Gaull airport carries out three inspections daily on each runway. Two are recommended under international aviation rules, airport authority spokesman Didier Hamon said. He insisted there was nothing untoward in the postponement.

The firefighters "traveled along the runway in both directions, of course with an informed and sharp professional eye," Hamon told reporters.

"We do believe that everything was done that day as it is normal to do," he said. "On that day, nothing abnormal, nothing exceptional was reported to the airport authority."

Investigators have said the metal part from the runway — bent at one end and covered with what appeared to be a greenish epoxy on one side and a reddish putty — did not appear to belong to the doomed plane.

But, Arslanian said, "it looks very like an aviation part."

No airline has reported that any aircraft leaving Paris that day was missing a part, but it is possible they may not have noticed yet, he said. Even if that weren't the case, he added, "you can find other ways for a piece to get onto a runway, even an aircraft piece."

Arslanian declined to say when the elite aircraft that cuts travel time across the Atlantic in half might return to the skies, or speculate if ever it would. France and Britain — the only countries with Concorde fleets — withdrew airworthiness certification last month.

"A simple tire burst, something that we cannot say will not happen again, caused the loss of the plane and the deaths of 113 people," said Alain Bouillard, the Accident and Inquiry Office's chief investigator.