A French court has found Continental Airlines criminally responsible for the crash of an Air France Concorde shortly after takeoff from Paris’s Roissy Charles de Gaulle airport in July 2000 with the loss of 113 lives.
The court ruled that the Concorde ran over a piece of metal that had fallen from a Continental DC-10, and that the metal shredded the Concorde’s tyres, pieces of which ruptured the aircraft’s fuel tanks causing a catastrophic fire in the left wing. Continental employee John Taylor was given a 15 month suspended sentence for the incorrect installation of the piece of metal, while the airline was fined €200,000 (A$274,000) for causing the crash, and was ordered to pay Air France a further €1m (A$1.34m) in damages.
A civil case brought by Air France against Continental is still pending.
