Continental Airlines, Continental stands by repair

Manufacturing News, Source : The Manufacturer
Published : 10 Apr 2002 10:04
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Continental Airlines of the US has rejected the core finding of the French enquiry into the fatal Concorde accident of July 2000.

The final report of France’s Bureau Enquêtes Accidents (BEA) says Concorde hit an engine wear strip which had fallen from a Continental DC10 moments before. In January the BEA final report said the strip ‘had neither been manufactured nor installed in accordance with the procedures as defined by the manufacturer.

Continental spokesman Nick Britton told The Manufacturer that Continental had followed procedures for making and installing the strip. When the strip had become detached, “we realised that those procedures in the manual were deficient”. Continental passed this information to the US National Trans-portation Safety Board (NTSB), the US accident investigation agency.

Britton said wear strips are often replaced and new holes drilled for them, as the manual provides. This was why the engine site the strip fell from had 37 holes in it. Britton says the deficiency of the hole-filling process was one reason Continental referred the issue to the NTSB: “They then forwarded our views on that to the BEA, according to international practice,” said Britton, “but the BEA chose to ignore those comments.”

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and its international equivalents regularly audit Continental’s maintenance procedures, Britton said. The manu-facturer’s specifications allow alternative equivalent materials to be used, but Continental could not establish whether the accident wear strip was titanium, as the BEA alleged, or even whether it had come from Continental’s plane because the French authorities had not given the airline enough access to the evidence.

Continental says the accident was caused by Concorde’s vulnerability to tyrebursts, and that the modifications to the plane support that view.

Continental’s DC10 fleet has been grounded since the accident, in which 113 died.

The airline is selling off its older planes. The lease on the aircraft which took off before the Concorde had expired and it is no longer in service with Continental.

The French judicial enquiry into the accident has not been published and may take some years. A California law firm is acting for relatives of the crew in a civil action against Continental.

 

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