France Concorde crash trial begins outside Paris
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Tuesday, February 02, 2010
US airline Continental and five individuals have gone on trial in France over the crash of an Air France Concorde nearly 10 years ago.
The jet took off in flames from Paris Charles de Gaulle airport and crashed minutes later, killing 113 people.
The presiding judge began the proceedings by reading out the names of all those who died.
An official report said Concorde had hit a metal strip from a Continental plane that had taken off earlier.
But Continental's lawyers say they can prove the supersonic jet caught fire before it struck the titanium strip.
"I am here to prove that Continental Airlines is not responsible," the airline's lawyer Olivier Metzner said as he arrived at the courtroom in Pontoise, west of Paris.
The stricken Concorde flight 4590 crashed in the town of Gonesse in July 2000, hitting a hotel and killing four people there as well as all 109 on board.
Most of the passengers were German tourists heading to New York to join a luxury cruise to the Caribbean. Nine French crew members also died.
The entire fleet of Concordes was grounded until an inquiry established that one of the plane's tyres had burst, causing rubber debris to shoot out and rupture a fuel tank.
Leaking kerosene then ignited and caused the catastrophe.
After nearly a year and a half out of service, in November 2001, the jets took to the air once more with new reinforced fuel tanks, but inquiries continued.
In December 2004, a judicial investigation concluded that a piece of metal left on the runway by another aircraft had caused one of Concorde's tyres to burst and shred.