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The trial reopened old questions over whether European engineers or an American company, Continental Airlines, was responsible for the July 2000 crash of the European jet
A French court will today declare whether who, if anyone, is to blame for the crash of a Concorde airliner outside Paris which killed 113 people more than 10 years ago.
Its verdict, after a four-month trial earlier this year, will determine whether European engineers or a US company and two of its staff were responsible for the disaster which sounded the death knell for the first era of suspersonic commercial flight.
The crash of the Air France aircraft, which killed all 109 people on board, mostly German tourists, and four on the ground, prompted a decade of judicial investigation before the hearing at Pointoise, northwest of Paris. The trial, which called dozens of witnesses and experts and cost an estimated €3m, was aimed at determining the precise chain of events which led to the jet plunging into a motel just minutes after takeoff from Charles de Gaulle airport.
Prosecutors argued the New York-bound plane was brought down by a strip of titanium metal which had fallen off a Continental DC10 aircraft onto the runway and burst a tyre on the Concorde, sending debris into the fuel tank and causing a fire. A French inquiry said the piece of metal was partly to blame for the disaster.
Lawyers for Continental suggested the Concorde was already on fire before it hit the metal strip and Houston-based Continental Airlines was not to blame. The company and two of its employees are accused of manslaughter. Three former French officials face the same charge for allegedly failing to fix weak spots on the Concorde after the inquiry by the country's aviation authority concluded that while the crash could not have been predicted, the plane's fuel tanks were not sufficiently protected, a flaw that had been known about since 1979. Their lawyers said they were not to blame and the crash could not have been foreseen.
Most families of those who died have already compensated but Fenvac, a French association that represents victims of accidents and is a civil party in the case, said in a statement issued on Friday that during the trial, it had been "striking and shocking to see how the defendants were determined to avoid or play down any responsibility, citing probabilities, nuances of terminology, failing memory, obscure rules and other means of artifice."
A prosecutor asked the court to fine Continental €175,000 ($234,000) and sought 18-month suspended prison sentences for two employees, mechanic John Taylor and his now-retired supervisor Stanley Ford.
The prosecution also requested a two-year suspended sentence for Henri Perrier, former head of the Concorde programme at plane maker Aerospatiale, and the acquittal of French engineer Jacques Herubel and Claude Frantzen, former chief of France's civil aviation authority.
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