Continental caused Concorde crash?
 

Continental DC-10 said to have caused Air France Concorde crash.

http://www.airdisaster.com/news/0704/22/news.shtml

I hadn't heard this before. Will CO be charged ?

I believe this was made public already quite shortly after the accident. I have never heared about any claim. Maybe now that it has been confirmed, something is going to be filed...

What caused the crash was the tires. Regardless if something was left behind by a previous plane. The tires should have been able to withstand that object. If the tires didn't shred and get sucked into the engine then there would have been no crash.

This is more detail on a very old news story. Air France (and its insurers) sued Continental about a month after the original incident. Subsequently, several victims families also sued CO, as well as Goodyear, the maker of the Concorde's tires. I am not aware of any resolution of these claims to date.

These incidents are always a chain of events that come together in the most terrible way. If one item in the chain would have been prevented, the accident wouldn't have happened. One could argue that ADP were at fault for not sweeping the runway regularly enough. You could argue the design of the tires was faulty. The positioning of the fuel tanks. The captain for shutting down the engine when it was still working. It was a tragic accident.

Maybe it was a Concords design that caused it. Maybe the runway monitors were sucking down croissants instead of monitoring. Maybe the pilot wasnt watching the runway

The debris from the CO DC-10 that departed CDG minutes before AF #4590 was certainly a "but for" cause of the Concorde crash. In other words, without the metal strip, the whole chain of events would have never started. However, I am convinced that a much more significant and proximate cause of the crash was human error. To this end, The Observer article "Doomed" by David Rose is a must read. His conclusion: "Men, not God, caused Concorde to crash, and their omissions and errors may have turned an escapable mishap to catastrophe." More specifically, the confluence of the following errors and omissions caused the crash:

(1) Air France's poor maintenance in failing to replace a spacer on the landing gear (this resulted in Concorde drifting off center as it hurtled down the runway, possibly causing the ingestion of runway lights into one or more engines and also contributing to number two below because the plane was on a collision course with another AF plane carrying Jacques Chirac);

(2) A load in excess of the permissible maximum takeoff weight (MTOW) (coupled with a takeoff with a tailwind);

(3) Premature rotation with insufficient airspeed to avoid a stall; and

(4) The shutting down of the number two engine by the understandably harried flight engineer after takeoff, an engine that was still producing critical thrust.

With regard to the civil lawsuit that has been filed in Houston, I cannot envision CO or Goodyear being held liable. An essential element of negligence is foreseeability, and I don't know how either party could have foreseen that a tiny strip of metal would have fallen from a departing airplane, coming to rest on a runway where it would slice through another airplane's tire, causing a fatal loss of control.

According to civil law in the US, the problem you would have is causation and foreseeability. I bet Co would get out on summary judgment if anyone sued them.

The liability according to the report would be against the tire manufacturer/designer, manufacturer/designer of the fuel tank/system and wing protection designs from run way hazards, and the airport for not insuring clear runways if the government is not immune.

Criminal liability in the US is a tougher standard. The issue is is Co grossly negligent for failing to insure that a piece would fall of the DC10. My guess is no.

So is Co liable. My answer (according to US law) is neither under the civil or criminal law.

I seem to recall seeing a documentary on heathrow about the crews charged with driving down the runways and checking for debris. It seems like a common problem. The finger seems to point to the airport and the concord manufacturers/designers. The airline is probably the least liable unless they failed to follow a directive. The pilots did every thing they could to prevent the crash.

Only my opinion, and the law is grey.