Safety shield the latest Concorde crash suspect

By CATHERINE FIELD herald correspondent

PARIS - The investigation into the July 26 crash of an Air France Concorde has shed light on another suspected design flaw in an aircraft previously hailed as an engineering masterpiece.

The new culprit is a small fibreglass shield, attached just in front of the tyres on the plane's undercarriage, which deflects spray from the engines when the jet takes off and lands on wet runways.

Paul-Louis Arslanian, head of the Accident Inquiries Board which is conducting a technical inquiry into the crash, acknowledged yesterday that pieces of the deflector had been found on the runway after the Concorde took off from Roissy/Charles de Gaulle Airport in flames.

The American daily USAToday, quoting sources close to the inquiry, said investigators were exploring whether the deflector might have been smashed from the undercarriage by a burst tyre during takeoff, its shards sent spinning catastrophically into a fuel tank and causing a leak which triggered the fire.

A similar incident happened on a British Airways Concorde in 1993, although there was no fire, the paper said. Two years later, BA modified the deflector so that it would not disintegrate, although Air France says it did not follow suit as it was not a measure required by the national civil aviation safety authorities.

Arslanian said: "We have found deflector pieces, and this is an element of the inquiry."

The disclosures about the deflector do not remove the other question mark hanging over the plane's design. The chief suspect is the tyre that burst at high speed, possibly causing an undercarriage wheel to slam into the runway and break up, its pieces puncturing the fuel tank. Last week, it was disclosed - again in the American media - that BA and Air France Concordes had had a history of dangerous tyre breakups.

BA has continued to fly its seven supersonic jets, but Air France said yesterday that its five remaining Concordes would remain out of service until more is known about what happened.

Meanwhile, the crash has helped to revive controversial plans to build a third airport for Paris to help ease air traffic congestion.

Only two years ago, Transport Minister Jean-Claude Gayssot put the plans on ice and instead plumped for building two additional runways at Roissy. Now the scheme is back on the agenda.

A decision on whether to push ahead with the airport will be probably be announced next month. Gayssot denies that accident has had any bearing on the decision, but this response is widely dismissed as bogus, given the enormous shock of the crash and the clamour for safety that it sparked among local residents.

The stricken jet crashed near Gonesse, a straggly suburban town in farmland a few kilometres from Roissy. Four of the 113 fatalities were in a small hotel that was engulfed in a fireball as the Concorde smashed into the earth.

But the toll would have been much higher if the plane had ploughed into the busy A1 motorway linking Paris with northern France and Brussels, or if it had veered towards the large town of Villepinte, to the southeast.

In 1996, an independent commission tasked with resolving the fast-looming problem of saturation and worsening aircraft noise at Roissy suggested building the new airport at Beauvilliers, near Chartres, southwest of Paris.

Other possible sites were in Picardy to the north, Chateauroux to the south or expanding Vatry, a freight airport to the northeast.

Whichever of these or other sites is chosen, it would be at least 150km from Paris and would have to be linked to the city by France's successful high-speed train, the TGV. The complex and attendant infrastructure would take around a quarter of a century to build, at the cost of tens of billions of dollars.

Given France's lavish expanses of underpopulated land, the choice of a site is a smaller hurdle than overcoming the resistance of airlines and travel businesses to moving to a distant airport in the beetroot fields.

And they argue that even remote locations become a magnet for satellite towns, as Roissy, built in the 1970s in farmland, has proven.