THE SLIP IN ENGINEERING SAFETY
THE BLACK MARK ON CONCORDE’S INVINCIBLE RECORD
Source -i.pinimg.com
T
he evening of 25th July 2000 might have been a normal
Tuesday evening for the French in Paris. But the pas-
sengers on Air France Flight 4590, were a bit worried
because their flight was facing a delay of one hour.
Passengers on this Concorde airliner were bound to
New York, starting their journey from Roissy-Charles de Gaulle
Airport. The normal protocol of a Concorde flight includes a full
runway inspection before the takeoff, but this was not complet-
ed for this particular flight due to the flight being already late.
The airliner was left in the hands of Pilot Christian Marty and his
co-pilot to cruise across the Atlantic.
The history of supersonic commercial air travel runs back to the
1950s and 1960s, the same period that witnessed the Cold War -
American and Soviet spaceflight rivalry- that launched man into
space. While the superpowers rushed to conquer outer space,
Britain and France were aiming at supersonic air travel to manu-
facture air crafts that could fly faster than sound.
agreement.
The Concorde is one of the fastest passenger
vehicles ever made. It has a peak speed of 2,180
km/hr, equal to a Mach number of 2.04, which
is more than twice the speed of sound. The
flight has a seating capacity of 92 to 128 pas-
sengers. First flown in 1969, Concorde entered
service in 1976 and continued to fly for the next
27 years. It is one of the only two supersonic
airliners operated commercially; the other is
the Soviet-built Tupolev Tu-144, which was in
operation for a much shorter period.
On the eve of 25th July 2000, the ground con-
trol gave permission to Air France flight 4590
to use runway 26 as requested by the crew. The
flight taxied towards the runway at 4:34 p.m.
(French time).
In the late 1950s, the US, France, Britain, and the Soviet Union
became involved in supersonic jet designing. British and French The ongoing conversation with the ground
companies, with the backup of their governments, developed control was recorded in the black box as fol-
designs that were ready for manufacturing by the early 1960s. lows.
However, the cost of such an enormous project was overwhelm-
ing for either country to be accomplish alone. As a solution,
British Aerospace and France’s Aerospatiale collaborated in
1951, in the production and development of the project. This
negotiation was not a commercial agreement between the two
companies, but as an international treaty between the nations;
the treaty which was signed in 1962. The Concorde meaning;
agreement, harmony, or union, got its name as a result of this
Gauge Magazine University of Peradeniya 15