Engine repair delayed flight

Published 12:00 am Wednesday, July 26, 2000

The Associated Press

GONESSE, France – The Concorde that crashed and killed 113 people during takeoff had been delayed for last-minute maintenance on one of its engines, Air France said Wednesday as its fleet of supersonic jets was indefinitely grounded.

Wednesday, July 26, 2000

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GONESSE, France – The Concorde that crashed and killed 113 people during takeoff had been delayed for last-minute maintenance on one of its engines, Air France said Wednesday as its fleet of supersonic jets was indefinitely grounded.

In a statement, Air France said it had taken a replacement part from a backup Concorde to repair one of the doomed plane’s engines before Tuesday’s crash.

That information was released Wednesday as French forensic experts examined the charred bodies to determine their identities and as relatives of the victims, mainly German tourists, began arriving in Paris.

”Today Germany is shaken,” Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said at a service for the victims at a chapel in Hanover, Germany, on the grounds of the World’s Fair. Pope John Paul II sent condolences.

In France, President Jacques Chirac said ”everything” would be done to determine the causes of the accident.

Air France said the crash of Flight AF4590 appeared to have been caused by a fire in one of the engines at the moment of takeoff. Possible causes of the fire ranged from birds flying into the air intake to mechanical failure, experts said.

In a statement, the airline said the ”engine reverse thruster” of engine 2 of the doomed plane was inoperative on its return from New York on July 24. Such thrusters are used to slow the plane upon landing.

Although the required piece was not available, Flight AF4590 was cleared for departure because of a technical level of tolerance allowed by the manufacturer, Air France said.

However, the pilot, taking into account that the plane was full, ordered the replacement of the inoperative part, the Air France statement said. Workers took a piece from a backup jetliner, and the repair took 30 minutes.

The airline’s statement did not indicate whether the last-minute repair could have been related to the catastrophe.

French Transport Minister Jean-Claude Gayssot on Wednesday ordered the indefinite suspension of all Air France Concorde flights. He said he wanted more checks, with an emphasis on the recovered black boxes – the flight recorders and cockpit voice recorder.

The Ministry of Transportation said the two recorders were damaged but had been found.

Air France already had grounded all Concorde flights Wednesday. British Airways canceled its two Tuesday night flights, but resumed Concorde service Wednesday between New York and London after completing safety checks.

Until Tuesday, the Concorde had a perfect safety record during 31 years of service since it was developed by Britain and France in the 1960s.

At least one of the two left-side engines was on fire as the plane took off at 4:44 p.m. from Charles de Gaulle airport carrying 100 passengers and 9 crew members, witnesses said. As the jet struggled to gain height, witnesses saw a plume of flame trailing 60 yards behind it.

All those aboard perished, along with four people on the ground. Twelve people were rushed out of Hotelissimo, the hotel that was hit. One was seriously injured, police said early Wednesday. A neighboring hotel was damaged.

The toll on the ground could have been much worse: 45 Polish tourists who were staying at Hotelissimo had left earlier to go sightseeing. They returned after the crash to find an inferno where their hotel once stood.

”We were totally unaware of what had happened,” Maciej Kuznik, the group’s guide, told Poland’s private Radio Zet.

Ninety-six of the passengers on board the Concorde were from Germany – 13 from the town of Moenchengladbach, on the border with the Netherlands. There were also two Danes, one Austrian and one American. The American was a retired Air France employee, but the company did not release a name.

The victims on the ground included two Polish hotel employees, the Polish Consulate in Paris confirmed. Television reports said the other two were a British tourist and a French woman.

The Concorde passengers were headed for New York, where they planned to board a German cruise liner for a luxury voyage through the Caribbean.

The dream vacation ended in a nightmare of flame and black smoke at Gonesse, a small town near Charles de Gaulle airport about nine miles northeast of the French capital.

”We saw flames shoot up 40 meters (120 feet) and there was a huge boom,” said Samir Hossein, a 15-year-old student from Gonesse who was playing tennis. ”The pilot tried to yank it up, but it was too late.”

The plane, full of fuel on takeoff for the Atlantic run, had been in service since 1980 and had flown 12,000 hours. It had its last mandatory regulatory checkup July 21.

Twelve of the needle-nosed supersonic jetliners are still operated by Air France and British Airways.

The Concorde, which first flew in 1969, has been considered among the world’s safest planes. Its only major scare came in 1979, when a bad landing blew out a plane’s tires – an incident that led to a design modification.

The plane, which crosses the Atlantic at 1,350 mph, is popular with celebrities, world-class athletes and the rich. It flies above turbulence at nearly 60,000 feet, crossing the Atlantic in about 3 1/2 hours, less than half the time it takes regular jetliners. A round-trip Paris-New York ticket costs $9,000.

Air France will compensate the families of those who died, spokesman Francois Brousse said.