Air France flight 4590

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Air France flight 4590
Aerospatiale-BAC Concorde 101, Air France AN0702255.jpg

The later crashed machine in July 1985
Accident summary
Accident type Crash due to fire and engine failure
place at Gonesse , Paris , France
date July 25, 2000
Fatalities 109
Survivors 0
Fatalities on the ground 4th
Injured on the ground 1
Aircraft
Aircraft type Aérospatiale-BAC Concorde
operator Air France
Mark F-BTSC
Departure airport Paris-Charles-de-Gaulle airport
Destination airport John F. Kennedy International Airport
Passengers 100
crew 9
Lists of aviation accidents

On the flight 4590 of Air France an accident on 25 July 2000 at Gonesse Concorde shortly after takeoff from Paris-Charles de Gaulle . All 109 inmates and four people on the ground were killed and another person on the ground was seriously injured.

Aircraft and crew

The Concorde series 101 (Air France) with the serial number  203 (3rd machine of the main series) was taken over by Air France on October 24, 1979 and carried the aircraft  registration F-BTSC. At the time of the crash, the aircraft had completed 11,989 flight hours and 4,873 flights. The last D-Check had taken place on October 1, 1999, the last scheduled A-Check on July 21, 2000. Since the last maintenance, F-BTSC had carried out four flights. On July 25, it was intended as a reserve and was temporarily called Replacement used. The aircraft was ready to fly and there were no known defects.

The flight captain Christian Marty had a total of 13,477 flight hours (including 5,495 as commander), of which 317 were on the Concorde (284 as commander). The first officer had an experience of 10,035 flight hours, 2,698 of which on the Concorde. The crew also included a flight engineer , a cabin manager and five flight attendants .

Until this incident, no Concorde had crashed.

the accident

Five minutes before the start of the aircraft had a McDonnell Douglas DC-10 of Continental Airlines a 435 mm long and 34 mm wide strip of sheet metal from a titanium alloy lost on the runway. The actually prescribed inspection of the runway before the start of the Concorde was not carried out. When accelerating on the runway, this part cut a tire on the Concorde's landing gear, whereupon it burst. A 4.5 kg piece of tire then hit the underside of the wing at a speed of approx. 500 km / h and damaged the landing gear.

Although the kerosene tanks were not penetrated, the shock wave of the impact caused a crack in tank no. 5, which is located directly above the landing gear. Other parts of the tire damaged the chassis electrics. Probably sparks were created on the damaged electrical system of the landing gear, which ignited the escaping fuel. At the time of ignition, engines 1 and 2 lost all thrust, but engine 1 was able to recover in the next few seconds. In the cockpit, the flight engineer switched off engine 2.

After the Concorde had already exceeded the V1 speed (decision speed ), take-off was mandatory. The remaining three engines, however, were not sufficient to gain sufficient speed for a climb, since the landing gear could not be retracted for unknown reasons. At a constant speed of 200 knots (370 km / h), the aircraft could not exceed the altitude of 200 feet. The fire, meanwhile, spread further and led to the disintegration of the left wing. Engine 1 finally failed at this point. As a result of the asymmetrical thrust, the right wing rose until the Concorde reached an incline of over 100 °. The crew tried to compensate for the bank angle by reducing the thrust of engines 3 and 4, but lost control because the flight speed was too low. Two minutes after the start of the take-off run , the Concorde hit a hotel near the airport and burned out.

The crew had tried to use the nearby Le Bourget airport . However, experts doubt whether a safe landing would have been possible given the flight route of Flight 4590.

The last recordings of the Cockpit Voice Recorder (translated from French ; times in UTC , seconds without decimal places):

(Fire brigade gives clearance for lane 6R)
14:44:14 Co- pilot : "Le Bourget, Le Bourget, Le Bourget!"
14:44:14 Captain : "Too late (indistinct)."
(Tower corrects fire brigade and names runway 09)
14:44:18 Captain : "No time, no (indistinct)."
14:44:22 Copilot : "Negative, we're trying Le Bourget."
14:44:24 Switch noises
14:44:26 Copilot : "No (unclear)."
14:44:27 Switch noises and objects start moving in the cockpit
14:44:31 End of the recording

Investigation and trial

An identical McDonnell-Douglas DC-10 from Continental Airlines

The final report of the French investigative authority concluded that the metal strip on the runway was the cause of the crash. The metal strip had come off a flap on the tail engine of the DC-10 operated by Continental Airlines. It was installed in Houston on July 9, 2000, after it had already been replaced in Tel Aviv in June. Neither manufacture nor installation of the strip complied with the manufacturer's specifications. The weight of the Concorde was one ton above the maximum take-off weight , but this had only a negligible influence on the take-off sequence. The structural damage was so great that a crash would have been inevitable even with normal engine performance.

The trial of the crash began on February 2, 2010 in Pontoise near Paris with the names of the victims being read out. The prosecutor of the criminal court accused the US airline Continental and five other defendants of negligent homicide . On December 6, 2010, the court convicted Continental Airlines and one of the airline's mechanics of negligent homicide. The airline has to pay a fine of 200,000 euros. She has to pay Air France one million euros as compensation. The mechanic received 15 months probation . However, he was acquitted in the second instance. Four other defendants were acquitted, including Henri Perrier, who was then head of the Concorde program.

Reactions to the judgment

International observers criticized the judgment as being tendentious. Serious tire problems had occurred several times in the history of Concorde. Due to the required high take-off and landing speed, the tires were exposed to extraordinary loads.

  • On June 14, 1979, when a Concorde took off from Washington Airport, two tires on the left landing gear burst . Parts of the hydraulic system were damaged by flying tire parts and a fuel tank leaked. The landing gear could no longer be retracted and the Concorde had to land again in Washington.
  • On September 16, 1980, when the Concorde G-BOAF (British Airways) took off from Washington, a tire burst . Tire parts damaged the engines and the airframe on landing.
  • On February 19, 1981, when the Concorde F-BTSD (Air France) took off from Washington, a tire burst on the left landing gear. The Concorde was then diverted to New York JFK due to significant vibrations .
  • On July 15, 1993, when Concorde 102 (British Airways) landed at London-Heathrow, a tire burst due to a blockage in the braking system on the right landing gear. The right wing, hydraulic lines and engine no. 3 were damaged by flying debris.
  • On October 25, 1993, when a British Airways Concorde took off from London Heathrow, a tire burst due to a defect in the braking system. Flying parts damaged the fuel tank.

As a solution to the tire problems, a significant reinforcement of the tires or a stronger shielding of the underside of the Concorde to protect against flying debris was proposed. However, both would have meant a significant increase in weight for the aircraft, so that these measures were not implemented.

Several witnesses had testified during the trial that the tire had burst in the accident before the metal part in question was run over. Observers criticized that these testimonies had not been sufficiently taken into account in the judgment. The presiding judge wanted to keep the "Concorde myth" and therefore put all the blame on the US airline. Continental Airlines attorney Olivier Metzner announced that he would challenge the verdict, saying that the decision would only protect the interests of French business.

Further aspects of the cause of the accident

Regardless of the metal part on the runway as the sole cause of the accident, several factors spoke against a safe flight. Four days before the accident, a spacer ring was not reinstalled on the left main landing gear during maintenance . This spacer ring is required to keep the chassis bearings in the correct position; if they slip, the entire main landing gear is no longer correctly guided. This put more strain on the tires, which were already working at their limit, and ensured that the machine moved from the center line of the runway to the edge, where the strip of titanium sheet that damaged the tires lay. The aircraft was overloaded by 1700 kg (1200 kg of unneeded taxi fuel , 500 kg of luggage). This required a higher take-off speed, which also put even more stress on the tires. The captain decided to take off with a tailwind of 8 kn, which in turn required a higher take-off speed relative to the runway and an even higher load on the tires.

Appeal process

On November 29, 2012, a French court of appeal in Versailles acquitted the US airline, which had meanwhile been merged into United Continental , of the criminal responsibility for the crash. Nevertheless, the company had to pay one million euros in damages to the Concorde owner Air France and a sum of 300,000 euros to other parties. Two former Continental employees and a former person in charge of the French aviation authority DGAC were also acquitted.

Consequences of the accident

Commemorative plaque at the Gonesse crash site in August 2018

Air France stopped operating Concorde after the accident, and the British civil aviation authority CAA issued an airworthiness directive for the aircraft type. Only after numerous design changes did the Concorde regain traffic approval. The last flight on a British Airways Concorde from London Heathrow to the Aviation Museum in Filton took place on November 26, 2003 .

Inmates and victims

Flight AF4590 was a charter flight on behalf of the Peter Deilmann Reederei . 99 of the 100 passengers were on their way to New York to take part in a cruise with the Deutschland through the Caribbean . The hundredth passenger was a retired Air France employee from Frankfurt with US citizenship who acquired the charter flight with Deilmann Reederei for Air France in Frankfurt. Nine crew members (eight French, one German) were on board, including Captain Christian Marty , co-pilot Jean Marcot and flight engineer Gilles Jardinaud. The 99 passengers in Germany were 96 Germans, two Danes and one Austrian. 42 of the German victims came from North Rhine-Westphalia, 13 of them from Mönchengladbach . Among the German passengers were the soccer coach Rudi Faßnacht , his wife Sigrid, the trade unionist and writer Christian Götz and his wife Irene. Nobody on board survived.

Furthermore, four employees of the hotel on which the Concorde fell died (two Polish women, a French-Algerian dual national and a national of Mauritius of Indian origin), six others were slightly injured. 33 other Deilmann customers had already flown to New York on the Concorde scheduled route that morning.

Trivia

  • The scene of the accident is just five kilometers as the crow flies from the crash site of a Tupolev Tu-144 that crashed on June 3, 1973 in the neighboring town of Goussainville , killing 14 people (8 of them on the ground). The Tu-144 was the Soviet counterpart to the Concorde. After the accident, the Soviet development of a supersonic passenger aircraft was stopped.
  • The crashed Concorde with the serial number 203 and the registration number F-BTSC was used in 1978 and 1979 for the filming of the film Airport '80 - The Concorde .
  • On May 2, 1989, this machine carried Pope John Paul II from Réunion to Lusaka .
  • The unionist and writer Christian Götz and his wife Irene both had cancer and booked the trip to celebrate a “new” life together.

Movies

  • The first episode in the series Seconds Before the Disaster deals with the crash.
  • The disaster of Air France flight 4590 was in the Canadian television series Mayday - Alarm in the cockpit in the episode "Concorde in flames" (original title: "Concorde - Up In Flames" ; season 14, episode 7) treated.
  • Peter Bardehle, Angela Volkner: The crash of the Concorde. A film from the ARD series: Minutes of a disaster . Documentary, Germany, A Vidicom production commissioned by WDR, 2006.

Web links

Commons : Air France Flight 4590  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j Accident on 25 July 2000 at La Patte d'Oie in Gonesse (95) to the Concorde registered F-BTSC operated by Air France. (PDF; 16.8 MB) MINISTERE DE L'EQUIPEMENT DES TRANSPORTS ET DU LOGEMENT - BUREAU D'ENQUETES ET D'ANALYSES POUR LA SECURITE DE L'AVIATION CIVILE - FRANCE, December 14, 2004, accessed on November 5 2017 (English).
  2. ↑ a b Comment on the verdict - the others are to blame again ( Memento from December 7, 2010 in the Internet Archive ), by Christoph Wöß, tagesschau.de, message from December 5, 2010 (no longer available online)
  3. ↑ Former Concorde head quizzed on crash . BBC News, Sept. 27, 2005
  4. ↑ a b Doomed. The real story of flight 4590 . The Observer, May 13, 2001
  5. ↑ An emotional prelude to the dispute between the experts. ( Memento from February 4, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) tagesschau.de, February 2, 2010.
  6. ↑ Airline guilty in the “Concorde trial” in: Schweizer Fernsehen from December 6, 2010.
  7. ↑ Court sentenced Continental for Concorde crash in: Spiegel Online from December 6, 2010.
  8. ^ A b c d Concorde Accident - Concorde past accident history
  9. ^ Court convicts Continental of Concorde crash , Der Spiegel, December 6, 2010.
  10. ^ David Rose: Untold Story of the Concorde Disaster. Patrick Smith, December 9, 2012, accessed March 8, 2016 .
  11. ↑ a b Aviation disaster: court rejects guilty verdict in Concorde trial at Spiegel Online, November 29, 2012, accessed on November 30, 2012.
  12. ^ Acquittal: surprise in the Concorde trial . Morgenpost.de, November 30, 2012, accessed November 30, 2012.
  13. ↑ concordesst.com - Aircraft Number 203 (English); Retrieved January 23, 2011.
  14. ↑ Families wiped out in crash. BBC , July 31, 2000, accessed May 28, 2014 .

Coordinates: 48 ° 59 ′ 9 ″  N , 2 ° 28 ′ 19 ″  E