PARIS - British Airways was under pressure to ground Concorde last night, after Air France suspended all its supersonic flights until further notice.
The French decision follows the provisional finding that Wednesday's Concorde disaster was caused by a structural failure in the aircraft - the bursting of two tyres on take-off, causing rubber and metal fragments to sever fuel lines in the wings - rather than by an individual, human error.
The state-owned airline had hoped to resume its supersonic flights at the weekend but the French Government has ordered the five surviving Air France Concordes to remain on the ground until the precise chain of events which led to the crash is known.
It was also announced that a 114th victim of the crash had been found in the burned-out wreckage of the hotel in Gonesse, where the Concorde crashed. The victim has not yet been identified.
Some French aircrew unions made it clear that they would refuse to serve on Concordes until the accident was fully explained. They said it was disturbing that a prestige aircraft with a record of 25 years of safe commercial flying should be so vulnerable to a burst tyre.
"No pilot will take up a Concorde until we have a clear account of what happened and what will be done about it," said Etienne Lichtenburger, of the SPAC pilots' union.
Jean-Pierre Blazy, the Mayor of Gonesse, said: "It is imperative that Concorde remains grounded. I deplore the decision by the British to continue flying. They did not even have the decency to wait 24 hours."
The French Transport Minister, Jean-Claude Gayssot, fell short of demanding a suspension of all Concorde flights but called on the British and French authorities to work with British Airways and Air France on "new safety measures and new safety checks." He said the French Government wanted to allow Concorde to resume flights as soon as possible but the planes would remain grounded until the precise cause of the accident was known and the new safety measures were in place.
The French accident investigation agency has issued a brief statement , detailing its new findings about the disaster. On Friday, the agency, using evidence from the plane's black-box flight recorders, said that two engines had broken down, the undercarriage had failed to retract and fragments of tyre had been found on the runway.
The latest statement - based on the examination of the tyre fragments and debris along the flight path and at the crash site - placed these failures in time-order for the first time. Investigators said it appeared that one or probably two tyres had burst. A fire had then broken out under the wings of the plane, but probably not in the engines. The engines had failed for reasons still unknown. Aviation experts said the likely explanation was that splinters of metal from the deflated undercarriage had severed fuel lines, starting the fire and starving the engines of fuel.
- INDEPENDENT
Push to ground UK Concordes
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