Five workers and airline in the dock, accused of killing 113 in Concorde crash

A FOUR-month trial aiming to establish the definitive cause of the Air France Concorde crash in Paris ten years ago is due to start today.

It will consider if an abandoned scrap of metal on the runway was really the main culprit, as French investigators insist.

Prosecutors argue that the plane would never have crashed in July 2000 – killing 113 people – if a preceding Continental Airlines DC-10 had not dropped a piece of titanium onto the Charles de Gaulle airport runway.

Lawyers for Continental say the American airline is simply a scapegoat and that a fire broke out on the Concorde eight seconds before it even reached the titanium strip. The disaster in Pontoise, north of Paris, was the only crash of a Concorde.

The trial is expected to pin down who should be held criminally responsible for the crash, which killed 109 passengers and crew on the plane, mostly German tourists, and four people on the ground. Continental and two of its US employees are on trial for manslaughter.

Both aviation and judicial investigators have said the metal strip on the runway was the primary cause of the accident. Three former French officials also face charges; judicial investigators say they had long failed to fix the Concorde's vulnerable spots.

Money is not a major issue, since the victims' families accepted settlements long ago. The plane's airworthiness is not at stake: the jet was retired by both Air France and British Airways in 2003.

Concordes are now on display in museums including the Museum of Flight in East Lothian, relics from a time when supersonic flight seemed like the future of air travel. In the years after the Concorde crash, both French aviation and judicial investigators concluded that the DC-10's titanium piece – known as a wear strip – gashed the Concorde's tire, sending pieces of rubber into the fuel tanks, which caused a fire.

Continental mechanic John Taylor is accused of building and installing the titanium strip without following guidelines. Maintenance chief Stanley Ford is on trial for validating the strip's installation. The French judicial inquiry determined that the plane's fuel tanks lacked sufficient protection from shock, and that Concorde's makers had been aware of the problem since 1979.

The three other men accused of manslaughter in the case are Henri Perrier, head of the Concorde program at plane maker Arospatiale from 1978 to 1994; Jacques Herubel, a top Arospatiale engineer at Concorde from 1993 to 1995; and Claude Frantzen, who handled the Concorde program in various roles at the French civil aviation authority. They are accused of ignoring a host of problems, including "neglecting the risk of fires" on the supersonic jet.

Continental lawyer Olivier Metzner said he will ask for the proceedings to be called off, arguing that the document ordering the trial did not provide counterweights to the accusations against Continental, as is required.

Metzner argues that the supersonic jet was generally fragile and says that particular Concorde was in no condition to fly that day because it was overloaded and lacked a piece to stabilise its wheels.