Word: trialing
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...French, however, do not quite feel humiliated. Wronged, perhaps, but not humiliated. In a trial that opens outside Paris on Tuesday, French officials will try to pin the blame for the Concorde's demise on Continental Airlines. It was not, they insist, the Concorde's design that led to its demise; indeed the plane still has cherished status among many in France as a feat of engineering and aesthetics, hence the monument at Charles de Gaulle. (See four decades of the Concorde's supersonic magic...
Continental and two former employees are on trial for involuntary manslaughter, for having allowed a piece of titanium known as a wear strip to drop off one of the airline's DC-10 planes as it taxied down the runway two aircraft ahead of the fateful Air France Concorde, on a hot July afternoon in 2000. Five minutes later, the Concorde, according to the charges, rolled over the debris, which pierced one of its tires, sending pieces of rubber flying. One piece of rubber apparently penetrated the Concorde's full fuel tank, which exploded in fire. As traffic controllers screamed...
...maintenance work four days before the crash. Continental is the only company charged, along with the firm's former welder John Taylor, who fixed the titanium strip to the Continental DC-10, and his supervisor Stanley Ford. The French are also going after their own. In the same trial, Concorde's former head of testing Henri Perrier and former chief engineer Jacques Herubel as well as France's retired civil aviation chief Claude Frantzen are also charged with involuntary manslaughter for having failed to detect and fix faults in the aircraft that investigators believe contributed to the crash. If found...
...Concorde itself. That is a key point in the defense strategy pursued by Continental's lawyers, who say they have 28 witnesses who can provide similar testimony. The lawyers told the Parisien newspaper last Friday that they intend to ask the judge to dismiss the charges when the trial opens...
Leaving aside the airlines' reputations, however, there is another question at stake in the Concorde trial: Should companies even face criminal charges after their planes crash? Several U.S. safety officials say prosecuting and jailing airline employees could make them too afraid to report maintenance or design flaws, for fear that they might be blamed later for accidents. "If airlines were protected from criminal prosecution, those fears would dissipate," says Michael Barr, an aviation-accident specialist and instructor at the University of Southern California. "You have a whole lot of people who believe that accidents are just that - accidents," he says...