2017

ES2A5 Forensic Engineering: Learning from Failure

First Part to the Assessment Portfolio - Trade
Magazine Article

Case Study: Concorde crash at Paris on 25 July 2000 and foreign object
damage

PAUL TANU, YASSINE LARABI, OLIVER BLACKETT-ORD, SANDEV BATH

Introduction to Concorde
Aérospatiale-BAC Concorde is a supersonic transportation (SST) that was cooperatively
developed and produced by Aérospatiale and the British Aircraft Corporation (BAC), under
the development agreement between the United Kingdom and France. First flown in 1969,
Concorde come in service in 1976 and sustained commercial flights for 27 years. Among its
other destinations, Concorde manged to fly across the Atlantic in less than half the time of its
competitors.

With only 20 planes built, the development of Concorde

was a considerable economic loss; Air France and British
Airways also received significant government subsidies to
buy them.

Concorde was retired in 2003 due to a general decline in

the aviation industry after the type's only crash in 2000, the
Figure 1: The final Concorde
one discussed in the article, the 9/11 terrorist attacks in
2001, and a decision by Airbus, the successor firm of Aérospatiale and BAC, to end
maintenance support.

Concorde's name reflects the development agreement between the United Kingdom and
France. The aircraft is regarded by many people as an aviation icon and an engineering marvel.

Development

In the early part of the 1950s Morien Morgan was asked by the then director of the Royal
Aircraft Establishment (RAE), Arnold Hall, to form a committee for study of the concepts
related to SST ( supersonic transport. Fallowing the first meeting of the group in February
1954 a report was delivered the next year. The results were that extremely large engine
power was needed to produce enough lift for a take-off from exiting runways. Furthermore,
in order to provide the required fuel, "some horribly large aeroplanes" resulted. The
conclusion that was drown was that the concept of supersonic transportation was unfeasible,
but they suggested the continuation of low level research into the aerodynamics of
supersonic flight.

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 Soon after, reports on a new wing came out of the RAE,
the wing is known as the slander delta. The main writer
was Dietrich Küchemann, his papers revolutionised the
whole design process for supersonic airplane overnight.
When Küchemann introduced his ideas, Morgan at once
seized on it as the solution to the problems of SST. This
Figure 2: Wing designs for the Concorde
has since been considered to be the birth of the
Concorde.

As the delta wing planform was developing, so were the basics for SST. The original design by
Bristol, the Model 198, was a fairly small design with an almost straight edged delta wing,
only to evolve later into Model 223 which besides being larger it had an ogival wing and
canards (Thompson, 1965).

At the same time comparable politico-economic circumstances have led to a separate design
being developed in France. The only design produced by the French counterparts had only
one major difference, the fuel load it could carry. With development pushed by military cold
war planes, the TSR-2 engines ware created and allowed for only four engines to be used on
a civilian SST plane.

Treaties signed between the two countries were signed in 1962, with specific clauses
imposing heavy penalties for cancelation. Similar to the treaty between the French and British
governments that led eventually to the construction of the Concorde we all know, the name
Concorde in itself has versions both in English and French with the same meaning of
agreement, harmony, or union.

Regardless of the initial potential it held the project had suffered several cancelations. The
Soviet competitor the Tupolev Tu-144 has scared most buyers away as it crashed and also
how loud and polluting it was. These produced a change of the public opinion on SSTs (Leney
& Macdonald, 2010). This resulted in only four countries which left as potential buyers:
Britain, France, China, and Iran. In the end just, Air France and British Airways fulfilled their
orders, based on deals that each individual government will be entailed to a part of the profits.
Concorde also presented other problems, amongst them the fact that it costs more than six
times the average price of an aircraft at the time. Also world events at that time like the 1973

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oil crisis had a large effect on airplanes using a lot of fuel, that Is also the time when Boeing
747 was making subsonic flight more and more efficient whilst also reducing risk for the
airlines with its more classical design.

Before the crash

On 25th July 2000, at the airport “Roissy Charles De Gaulle” at 13:30 all the passengers had
checked in. The pilot, Christian Marty, aged 54-years old was already on the plane. With
13,477 flight hours (317 in Concorde) he was one of the most experienced pilots for Air
France. By checking out before take-off, Commander Marty discovered that Engine 2 had a
technical problem on a small piece: a thrust reverser. The repair of this would delay the take-
off of the plane for roughly one hour. At 15:54 the 100 passengers, mostly coming from
Germany (96) began to embark, and got ready to arrive in New York in 3 hours and 45 minutes
and then, take a cruise ship to the Caribbean. 41 minutes later, the passengers and the 9
members of the crew were about to take-off on the runway “26-droite”, five minutes after
Continental Airlines had taken off from the same runway. At this moment, the Concorde was
overloaded by nearly one tonne (810 kg exactly).

Description of the crash

On the runway, the Concorde was accelerating to reach its

take-off speed of 320 km/h. A few seconds later, when this
speed was reached, the second engine underwent a thrust
loss, at the same moment, the control tower warned the
pilot that flames were coming up behind the Concorde.
Christian Marty affirmed the reception of the message, but
it was too late, there was not enough space to brake, the
Concorde took off in the sky. There is only one video showing the Concorde in flames. This
video was taken by the wife of a truck driver, although being an amateur video, it was a key
element for the "Bureau Enquêtes Accidents" which is a French government agency
responsible for investigating aviation accidents and incidents. In this video, flames can be seen
on the left rear of the plane. The Concorde encountered serious difficulty in maintaining

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itself, just thirty meters above the ground, it threatened to crash at any time, right in the city
of Gonesse and its 25,000 inhabitants.

Figure 3: The Concorde taking off

Thanks to the flight recorder, we can analyse the conversation between the control tower
and the Concorde crew. The air traffic controller Gilles Logelin told the pilot “Do it at your
convenience, you have priority for the return to the field”. But the plane was too low to turn
around, the pilot reported “Negative, we try the Bourg…” communication interrupted, we
understand that the Bourge is an airport 20 km from the airport Roissy Charles De Gaulle. A
few seconds later, the control tower heard the last words of the captain: “Too late, no time”.
8 seconds after the plane descended below 15 meters, 3 seconds after Concorde crashed near
Le Bourget. Gilles Logelin asked to the pilot twice “Air france 4590, do you hear me?” No
response.

The plane crashed on a hotel: “Hotelissimo de Gonesse”, which resulted in 4 additional

victims. Fortunately, the hotel was almost empty at this moment of day. With the Concorde
fuel tank completely full, it only took a few seconds for the entire hotel to burn. The explosion
of the plane was so impressive that pieces such
as burning armrests were found miles away. Eight
minutes after the crash, dozens of fire trucks and
police officers were on the terrifying crash site.
Commander Fabrice Chauvin, regional fire chief,
confided that he had a double mission: on the
one hand the crash of the plane itself and the fire
caused, and on the other hand the care of the victims, and their evacuation towards a
hospital. But, in view of the fire, he quickly understood that there will be no survivors, the
intensity of it being so important, it took 3 hours for firefighters to extinguish this fire. It took
two long weeks for forensic scientists to identify the bodies, or at least what's left of them.

Figure 4: The hotel once the fire cleared

Engineering reasons for failure

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The failure of Flight 4590, from a forensic engineering perspective, is due to three main points:
the non-regulation procedure to install the wear strip to the engine cowl; issues relating to
the failure of the tyre; and finally the unsatisfactory casing in the fuel tanks. A combination of
these are the primary reasons for the failure of the flight.

The titanium alloy strip that had fallen on the runway, was the primary reason for the fatal
series of events. This strip was from the thrust reverser cowl door of a DC-10’s 3rd engine,
only 5 minutes before the take-off of the Concorde. The reason for the metal strip falling off
the engine of the DC-10, was that it was not manufactured or installed in the ways the
manufacturer had intended. The piece had additional holes drilled into it so that the rivets
used to attach the piece lined up with the holes on the intended area of the engine cowl. With
this adjustment, a red adhesive had to be used which was not on the maintenance procedure.

During take-off the Concorde ran over the metal strip, which cut tyre number 2 of the planes
left main landing gear. In the 31 years of operation there had been many incidents relating to
the Concorde’s tyres. The first of these had begun in 1976, when the number 5 and 6 tyres
blew up in a similar way to the tyre of flight 4590. This did not cause an explosion, however it
did throw large fragments into the wing and engine, like the Paris incident. Over the next 30
years, there were 57 cases involving Concorde tyres bursting or deflating. Of these events, 12
had resulted in structural damage to the wing or tanks, 6 of these had penetrated the fuel
tanks. After some of these issues, a few precautions had been implemented, one of which
was the required inspection of both wheels and tyres before every flight which was
implemented after the second tyre that burst in 1979.
Tyres on the Concorde had to be much more resilient to bursting and able to withstand much
higher speeds than other commercial planes, which was required due to its tailless delta-wing
form. This wing shape means the Concorde could not use normal aircraft flaps to aid lift and
so a much greater velocity is required on take-off. Tyres on the Concorde were not designed
to the level needed to stop or greatly minimise bursts.

From the clear pattern of tyre related incidents the reason for these tyre failures seems to be
due to a lack of specially developed burst resistant tyres earlier in the planes career. Even
after multiple, potentially fatal, incidents involving bursts and fuel tanks. This could have been

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done by developing the tyres to be burst resistant, which was the change made after the Paris
incident.

The unsatisfactory casing around the fuel tanks is how this incident became fatal. A piece of
the burst tyre had been propelled towards the wing where the number 5 fuel tank was fitted.
The initial assumption was that a 4.5kg chunk of tyre had been flung up and punctured the
fuel tank. Although under investigation it was shown that the tank had ruptured outwards
rather than inwards, which is what would be expected if the tyre had penetrated the tank.
After forensics replicated the effects of the piece of tyre hitting the underside of the wing at
the speed and energy it was likely to have had, they concluded that what had happened was
that the energy of the impact had not immediately ruptured the tank, however, it was the
shockwaves which firstly casted a deformity on the metal around the point of impact with the
tyre, then secondly the impact had also created a hydrodynamic pressure surge, which is
when a force on an enclosed fluid causes an uneven pressure distribution through the system
which in this case ruptured outwards at the weak point created by the initial impact. Once
punctured the fuel leaked from the plane and was set alight. This could have been from either
an electric arc from a cut wire in the landing gear or the heat in the engine could also have
ignited the fuel, although this was a very unlikely scenario.

A reason the tank was so easily burst was: a combination of a lack of strength in the
linings of the tanks; and the fact that the plane had just began its journey, which meant the
plane had full tanks of fuel. Which allowed the shockwaves to occur and the lack of an
additional protective layer meant the shockwave could break the tank. Following the crash,
Concorde did change their tank designs by adding a Kevlar lining to tanks 1, 4,5,6,7 and 8. This
meant the tanks could take a blunt force without rupturing at impact thanks to the strength
and flexibility properties of Kevlar.

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References
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Patte D'oie de Gonesse (95) au Concorde immatriculé F-BTSC exploité par Air France, f-
sc000725
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