Continental blamed for Concorde crash

Hardly a surprising verdict. The teflon French have a habit of casting off responsibility.

It's a shame that they had to criminalise those involved.
 
This is a crazy decision. As Scuzi says, it's magically absolved any French parties of all responsibility. It was an accident, and finding one Continental employee responsible is absurd.
 
On the 'Seconds from Disaster' program about this, they explained how the lifting action of Concorde upon take-off actually increased the downward force on the wheels for a short time, which resulted in a disproportionate number of tyre blow-outs as they had to increase the tyre pressure.

Newly designed tyres reduced the problem, but the extremely high air pressure in the new tyres was a contributing factor when one blew up and damaged the rest of the plane.

Not entirely on-topic, but interesting.
 
Well for those stating ridiculous decision, the mechanic was performing illegal repairs, botching them, and doing them with materials that were on a banned list.
Someone fixes your car that way, and your car fails, I think you will blame them.

Might not be the whole story or the entire picture, but the mechanic isn't blamless, and it would appear not to be an accident as some are suggesting. Botched illegal repairs don't lead to accidents, there clearly is blame attributable.
 
Agreed with Hikari, if the mechanic wasn't in breach of guidelines/law then the crash may have never happened. He was the one who created the possibility for it to happen.
 
Caged said:
This is a crazy decision. As Scuzi says, it's magically absolved any French parties of all responsibility. It was an accident, and finding one Continental employee responsible is absurd.
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The article says EADS are 30% responsible. It doesn't surprise me that it's a Texas-based airline playing fast and loose with safety regulations tbh.
 
Plane crashes are usually the culmination of many things going wrong at the same time. Pilots talk about the holes in the Swiss cheese lining up. Sure the piece of metal on the runway caused the tyre burst which punctured the fuel tank, but if one strip of metal on the runway can bring the plane down, there must be other factors in play.
 
The problem with saying 'it was an accident' is that Western society does not allow for an 'accident', especially when financial compensation is an issue.

All accidents are preventable, and what we now do is trace events back to last thing that could have been done differently in order to prevent the accident, and that's where we place 'blame'.

Kid slips on ice in the playground and bumps his head - accident. However, what we do is allocate blame: the teachers, for letting him play there; the caretaker, for not gritting it; the council, for not closing the school; the kid's parents for putting him in inappropriate footwear.

Same thing with Concorde. A mechanic using unauthorised materials; an ill-designed fuel tank system that was vulnerable to impact from below; a tyre-pressure problem that had been known about for years, and had been only partially addressed by the aviation authorities.

There's financial compensation at stake, and so they have to allocate blame to someone so the bill can be paid.
 
Journey said:
Thanks for your excellent thoughts and insight into this, it makes a refreshing change from people just posting a link to the BBC news page. :rolleyes:
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Thanks for that. Sorry you had to waste seconds of your precious time reading a thread obviously so far below you.

It was a thread to highlight a news item that some people in the forum may be interested in and were not aware of.

The case is closed so there's nothing to discuss. If you're not interested in the thread, then why comment? To dazzle me with your intellect?
 
@(ST)Pohaku

Why is it a problem?

Your car is wrecked through no fault of your own but due to a culmination of factors. You going to just write it off and say "**** happens" or you going to ensure that you don't get punished?

In this case many lives were lost. I think if this trial happened in the USA, there is no way the mechanic gets away with a suspended sentence. Negligence leading to the loss of 113 lives.
 
@(ST)Pohaku

Why is it a problem?

Your car is wrecked through no fault of your own but due to a culmination of factors. You going to just write it off and say "**** happens" or you going to ensure that you don't get punished?

In this case many lives were lost. I think if this trial happened in the USA, there is no way the mechanic gets away with a suspended sentence.
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Well I wasn't necessarily saying it was a problem for this case in particular, and although I've seen documentaries I know very little of the circumstances in detail, so I wouldn't be very opinionated to be honest.

My point though, was that some people were going down the 'it's just an accident' road, and I was trying to say that because of our increasingly 'sue-everybody' culture (UK television ad: "Where's there's blame, there's a claim!") and ambulance-chasing lawyers, there is no such thing as 'just an accident'.

I don't honestly know what the mechanic did or didn't do, nor whether other people made blameworthy decisions along the road to this disaster.

As far as the trial/sentence thing goes - you're probably right about the USA, but they don't get it right any more than anyone else does when it comes to justice and injustice.

If my car is wrecked, and this is an accident (as opposed to somebody being clearly to blame) then it is paid for by my car insurance, which I pay premiums for.
 
(ST)Pohaku said:
If my car is wrecked, and this is an accident (as opposed to somebody being clearly to blame) then it is paid for by my car insurance, which I pay premiums for.
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Yep. But then that's just moving the problem along. Why should your insurance company pay? They picked a premium which was equal to your risk and in this situation it wasn't your fault.

I'm basically saying, people deserve to get blame here.
 
scorza said:
It doesn't surprise me that it's a Texas-based airline playing fast and loose with safety regulations tbh.
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Neither does it suprise me that you'd come down against Continental, you are the most predictable poster on this forum. There seem to be serious doubts that it was infact the metal from the DC10 that caused the fire.
 
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