Concorde Crash Conviction

A French court has found Houston-based Continental Airlines guilty of involuntary manslaughter for its part in the 2000 Concorde crash which killed 113 people. The Airline has been fined 200,000 Euros and ordered to pay 1m Euros in damages to Concorde's operator, Air France.

John Taylor, a mechanic for Continental Airlines has also been found guilty and has been given a 15-month suspended jail sentence. Mr Taylor stood trial along with four other individuals, who were all later acquitted. One of them was the former chief of maintenance for Continental, whilst the others were French-ex officials, including Concorde's former chief engineer. All five individuals on the stand had denied the charges against them.

The ruling comes over a decade after the crash, which happened just outside Paris on 25 July 2000. The trial began in February 2010, following a request from a French public prosecutor in 2008 for judges to begin manslaughter charges against Continental and the individuals. It is believed that investigators produced over 80,000 documents to the court during their investigations into the crash.

The official report into the crash, which was published in December 2004, found that a piece of metal fell from a DC-10 plane run by Continental, which had taken off from Paris Charles de Gaulle airport just before the Concorde jet took off. The jet hit the titanium strip and one of the plane's tyres burst, causing rubber to fly up and rupture a fuel tank, which then burst into flames. John Taylor had used titanium parts to make repairs to the DC-10. The judge confirmed that the titanium debris was to blame for the crash and found that Mr Taylor should have used a softer metal such as aluminium, as titanium was known to be too dangerous for aeroplane tyres.

Continental's lawyers have disputed the Court's findings, arguing that the Concorde jet caught fire before hitting the titanium strip. They have stated that they will appeal the...