Airline to claim it is scapegoat as Concorde crash trial opens

US-based Continental Airlines and two of its staff are among those on trial for manslaughter. Investigators say the crash on July 25, 2000 was caused by a metal strip lying on the runway at Charles de Gaulle airport that had fallen from a Continental DC-10 minutes before.

Continental's lawyers will argue Concorde caught fire before it reached the debris and say the American company was just a scapegoat.

The judge opened the proceedings yesterday by reading out the names of the victims. She described the investigation as "difficult and technical". The court has amassed 80,000 pages of investigation.

Interest is so high the courtroom in Pontoise, outside Paris, has been expanded with makeshift walls. Hearings are also being broadcast on a video screen in a separate courtroom.

Besides pointing a finger at Continental, the prosecution also accuses French officials of neglecting to fix known design weaknesses in the jet.

Two others on trial for manslaughter were employed by Aerospatiale, the precursor of plane-maker Airbus, while the fifth is an employee of the French civilian aviation authority. Their lawyers say they were not to blame and argue the crash could not have been predicted.

As the trial opened, several lawyers said they had asked the court to call off the proceedings on a technicality. Olivier Metzner, the lawyer for Continental, and Daniel Soulez Lariviere, representing aviation official Claude Frantzen, said the document ordering the trial failed to provide counterweights to the accusations against their clients, as required.

The crash, which occurred minutes after take-off, killed 109 people on the plane, mostly German tourists, and four people on the ground. Compensation is not a major issue in the trial as most of the victims' families received settlements long ago.

In the years after the disaster, both French aviation and judicial investigators concluded the Continental DC-10's metal piece – known as a wear strip – gashed Concorde's tyre, sending pieces of rubber into the fuel tanks, which caused a fire.

Continental lawyer Mr Metzner says he will produce evidence from about 20 witnesses who say they spotted a small fire on the supersonic airliner before it reached the metal strip. He says Concorde had trouble spots in general and that particular plane was overloaded and took off missing a piece to stabilise the wheels.

Continental mechanic John Taylor, 41, is accused of breaking guidelines by replacing the DC-10's wear strip with titanium instead of aluminium. Maintenance chief Stanley Ford, 70, is on trial for approving the

strip's installation.

The three other men accused of manslaughter in the case are Henri Perrier, 80, ex-chief of the Concorde programme at plane maker Aerospatiale from 1978 to 1994; Jacques Herubel, 74, a top Aerospatiale engineer at Concorde from 1993-95; and Frantzen, 72, who handled the Concorde programme in various roles at the French civil aviation authority.

The trial continues.