Concorde Will Take Off Again, Officials Insist

Officials in Britain and France insisted Wednesday that the Concorde is not dead, despite aviation authorities’ decision to revoke the aging supersonic jet’s airworthiness certificate.

British Airways confirmed in a statement that it will be seeking meetings with the Concorde’s manufacturers and with air safety authorities to develop measures enabling the aircraft to resume operations as soon as possible.

Jean-Claude Gayssot, France’s transportation minister, also was publicly optimistic, predicting that the Concorde, developed as a Franco-British high-tech prestige project in the 1960s, still has “seven or eight years in front of it.”

Three weeks and one day after an Air France Concorde crashed after takeoff from Charles de Gaulle airport here, civil aviation authorities in both countries on Wednesday pulled the aircraft’s airworthiness rating until additional measures to enhance safety are taken. The accident killed 114 people.

Air France’s five remaining Concordes haven’t flown since the catastrophic July 25 crash, the first in the supersonic aircraft’s history.

British Airways, the only other carrier to operate the Concorde, imposed a one-day suspension after the accident, then put its seven planes back in service. On Tuesday, it grounded the planes.

“We are hopeful that the aircraft will fly again,” Capt. Mike Jeffrey, British Airways’ director of flight operations, told the London-based Financial Times newspaper Tuesday. “I can’t think of an aircraft type that has been grounded that hasn’t resumed operations.”

But many aviation industry experts were skeptical about the future of the jet after the loss of its airworthiness certificate.

“This is Concorde’s death warrant,” predicted Bernard Thouanel, a French aviation historian.

Chris Yates, an aviation analyst for the London-based Jane’s Transport, added: “Concorde has essentially been an icon of aviation for many years and was held in great esteem because of its safety record. With the fleets now grounded, the image of the aircraft becomes more and more tarnished as each day goes by.”

French investigators last week offered a possible scenario for the July disaster: a piece of metal of unknown origin about 16 inches long, lying on the runway at Charles de Gaulle airport, may have caused a tire on the landing gear to blow out as the Concorde raced toward takeoff at nearly 200 mph.

Pieces of the destroyed tire were thrown upward, rupturing at least one fuel tank. The leaking fuel caught fire as the Concorde took flight. Thrust failed on one, then two engines.

Less than 90 seconds after the blowout, and trailing a long plume of burning fuel, the Concorde slammed to the ground in the village of Gonesse, killing all 109 passengers and crew aboard and five people in a local hotel.

“The July 25 accident has thus shown that the destruction of a tire, a very simple event which cannot be asserted not to recur, has had catastrophic consequences in a very short time-scale without the crew being able to recover from this situation,” Ken Smart, chief inspector of Britain’s Air Accidents Investigation Branch, told a London news conference Wednesday.

Aviation industry officials say the Concorde is particularly prone to burst tires because it takes off at faster speeds than conventional planes. Its reinforced tires are also heavier; any pieces flung off have a greater chance of piercing the Concorde’s wings, which are thinner than those of most jetliners.

According to Yates, in 1993 a tire burst on a British Airways Concorde and caused a fuel tank rupture. The plane’s manufacturers, Aerospatiale SA of France and British Aircraft Corp., recommended inserting a steel cable into the landing gear’s mudguards to provide additional protection against flying fragments of rubber.

“Because only recommended, and not required, [British Airways] carried it out, but Air France didn’t,” Yates said. “They felt that it wasn’t necessary.”

The supersonic jets are estimated to account for only 1% to 2% of total revenue at both Air France and British Airways. Flying the fastest commercial jetliner in the skies confers enormous prestige on the two European carriers, but the harsh competitive realities of today’s airline business may make them reluctant to invest much more in the aircraft. In a typical year, fewer than 200,000 passengers streak across the Atlantic aboard the Concorde.

“For Concorde to be able to fly again, the certification procedure would have to be completely redone,” Bernard Pedamon, spokesman for the French pilots union, said in a newspaper interview. “All that presupposes enormous investments. The builders surely won’t be ready to do that. I’m afraid this is the end.”

According to the British magazine New Statesman, a study commissioned by British Airways in 1998 turned up numerous ailments suffered by the jet, including sound alarms triggered by abnormal vibrations in the engines, defects in the fastening of the landing gear and failures in on-board computers. Recently, fissures reportedly began appearing in the wings of some of the planes. The researchers identified 55 potential risks in the design of the Rolls-Royce Olympus engines.

Commercial service on the Concorde debuted Jan. 21, 1976, with an Air France flight from Paris to Rio de Janeiro and British Airways service from London to Bahrain. The Franco-British grand plan had called for at least 300 of the aircraft to be built, but the world oil crisis intervened, making the economic viability of such gas-guzzling planes even shakier.

In the end, only 16 Concordes were built for commercial service.

“These planes are now 24 years old,” said Thouanel, the aviation historian. “The question now is: Are passengers going to want to pay 50,000 francs [$7,050] for a ticket on Concorde if they are not totally sure of the safety of the plane on which they are going to fly?”

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Times staff writer Kirsten Studlien in London contributed to this report.