The Concorde crash

THE GRIMNESS OF the tragedy resulting from the death of all the passengers aboard the Concorde of Air France along with its nine- member crew near Paris on Tuesday becomes all the more poignant in view of the fact that the ill-fated plane should not have been allowed to take off. The plane along with Air France's other Concordes should perhaps have been grounded after the detection of cracks on four of them as the British Airways had earlier done when similar cracks on one of its planes had come to its notice. Whether the assumption that the cracks did not pose any danger to flight safety had anything to do with the crash is not as yet clear, but it is a question that may haunt Air France for some time.

The crash blots the record of the Concorde which has so far been accident-free since it took to the skies in 1969. As the first civilian supersonic plane - the world's air forces have squadrons of them - the Concorde travelling faster than the speed of sound reduced flying time almost by half, though the airlines flying them have had to deny themselves this advantage when the plane was flying over populated areas. It, however, took quite a long time for British Airways and Air France to reassure Governments and public opinion that the plane would satisfy the most stringent demands of flight safety. The doubts about whether the Concorde did really meet these demands could not be easily put to rest because of the failure of the supersonic Tupolev 144 project of the erstwhile Soviet Union. The enquiry into the crash should be uncompromisingly thorough and it should establish clearly whether it was due to a neglect of the warnings thrown up by the detection of the cracks. If, as is very likely, the ageing of the planes is making them unsafe to fly, they should be promptly grounded until the completion of the enquiry.

The crash which has interrupted the safety record of the Concorde should provide an occasion to take a fresh and closer look at the assurances about safety of flights at around 50,000 feet. They could not now be wholly relied upon especially in view of the planes becoming older without being replaced. Unless there is a well-laid-out and approved programme for ensuring additions to the existing Concorde fleet, the risk involved in flogging the existing fleet does not justify any hesitation over grounding the planes for a thorough scrutiny of their airworthiness. Since even at present flying the planes at supersonic speeds has to be restricted to the flights over the oceans - and this is for the most part the Atlantic - the economics of flying the Concorde for which its passengers have to pay a very high fare has remained doubtful right from the beginning. The crash provides an occasion for examining these and other questions which have long remained unanswered.

There had been a stiff opposition to the induction of the Concorde as a civilian supersonic plane in both Europe and the U.S. since the flying of the plane at the stratosphere could rip up the ozone cover which has already been under growing threat from the emission of chloro-fluorocarbons (CFCs). The Massachussets Institute of Technology (MIT) also drew attention to the dangers arising from the discharge of nitrous oxide into the stratosphere by Concordes in flight. A report of the Climatic Impact Assessment Programme of the U.S. Department of Transportation sought to allay these fears by pointing out that the danger of ozone ripping was exaggerated. Apart from the questions relating to safety which will be thrown up by the Concorde crash, it will have to be seriously considered whether the ageing Concordes should continue to fly.

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