Regards,
CivAv Team

Comments with real substance, and not simply words of support or praise, are much more likely to grab my attention and be published in this blog.

Please note that I am also open to constructive criticism. Don’t be shy to express your disagreement with anything that is stated in this blog.

Also, keep in mind there is more to the Concorde joint development, engineering challenges, operational successes, recurring incidents and the one single deadly crash than be told in a one posting.

One commentator asked me what software I use for this blog. It’s WordPress.com, a reliable and user-friendly blogging software.

Steve

Your points are well taken. The issues you bring up have been canvassed by various lawyers at the Pontoise hearings, maybe not as conclusively as one would hope.

In fact, what remains unclear after the hearings is how the specific issues raised play in the general context of the criminal proceedings.

One decent and professional French blogger for a Parisian daily (“La Croix”) covering the trial wrote at the conclusion of the hearings that he will come up with his own summation of the proceedings next Tuesday, June 1st. Let’s see if he comes up with a novel perspective outlining the big picture about this sad aviation accident.

The real judicial outcome will only be known when the presiding judge at the hearing issues her decision in December 2010.

Until then, public opinion might go in many directions.

My personal take is that, whatever the technical and legal issues raised about Concorde are, the supersonic airliner that crashed back in July 2000, just North of Paris was but one of the very few units built for and operated by Air France and British Airways. This entails that the whole domain of supersonic public transport never really matured, as did subsonic public transport, for lack of breadth of experience and feedback from the only two commercial operators of Concorde.

Having the best engineers and the most dedicated team of pilots, experts and managers of all sorts assigned to the Concorde program cannot make up for the glaring paucity of data on the Concorde program and commercial supersonic flight in general when such data were most needed.

During the four-month hearing, we heard prosecution and defense lawyers juggling with specific issues. I don’t think any of them made a plausible attempt at bringing up the broad picture. Why should they? That’s not what they are hired for. Or maybe that is not even what the Pontoise trial was all about.

Practically speaking, the Concorde project was quite advanced as far as a prolonged testing program goes, with all due respect for Concorde’s airworthiness certification by public authorities. However, in terms of day in/day out commercial flight operations, the program was short on operational feedback, i.e.: the kind of sufficient and varied data leading to timely corrective actions that could have prevented the Paris crash and resulted in the decision to retire the Concorde fleet in a timely fashion, before the commercial aspects of civil aviation ultimately so required.

PS: There is talk of getting a Concorde back in the air for the 2012 London Summer Olympics in a “heritage capacity.” This project has yet to be confirmed.