The Mammoth Book of New Csi (43 page)

At the same time, the flight engineer said: “I’m firing.”

The captain asked: “[Are] you shutting down engine two there?”

The flight engineer replied: “I’ve shut it down.”

Seconds later, the flight officer said: “Airspeed.”

The airspeed was still only 200 knots when the normal climb-out speed was 220 knots. Over the next seven seconds, airspeed increased to 211 knots. Then the flight officer announced: “The gear isn’t retracting.”This was thought to be due to the failure of the left main landing gear door to open fully.

By then, the flame had been established for thirty-five seconds. Engine one surged again. Then engine two’s fire alarm sounded one more time. It continued to sound until the end of the flight.

The ground proximity warning system sounded: “Whoop, whoop, pull up.” This was heard three times. The nose was up at five degrees. The radio altimeter read 165 ft and the rate of descent was about 160 ft a minute.

There were disturbances in the fuel flow to engine one and the temperature of its exhaust. Eight seconds later, rudder control was switched to manual, leading to the loss of yaw autostabilization. By then, engine one was decelerating and only engines three and four remained in operation, causing the plane to bank to the left. The thrust was reduced to counter this, but this caused them to surge due to the disruption of the airflow caused by the yaw and the angle of attack, which was now twenty-five degrees. By then, the fire had destroyed vital control surfaces. Even if all four engines had been operating at that point, the damage caused by the fire to the structure of the wing and the flight controls would have caused the plane to crash.

The crew had been drilled in what to do in the event of an engine failure during training and in the flight simulator. They knew the importance of speed with Concorde, especially on the runway. But they were not prepared for a double engine failure on the take-off run. Thought to be a highly unlikely event, this scenario was not covered in training. After noticing the loss of thrust on engines one and two, the flight engineer said the word: “Stop.” Then, noting that engine one was recovering, he announced: “Failure eng . . . failure engine two.” He was plainly in a state of agitation.

But it was too late to stop the take-off. The sideways movement of the plane threatened to carry it off the runway and the captain decided to get it into the air as soon as possible. Engine two was shut down by the time they got to 400 ft (122 m). Alarms sounded, but the crew had no way of grasping the overall reality of the situation. All they could do was react instinctively to what they knew was an extremely dangerous situation. They were in no way to blame. The accident report noted: “Each time the situation allowed, they applied the established procedure in a professional way.”

A great deal of tank five had melted so it was not possible to determine exactly how it had ruptured. But it was thought that it burst due to the pressure wave caused by the impact of a large piece of the tyre – though this had never been seen on a civil aircraft before. However, this does not explain the loss of fuel from tanks two and six. No debris was found from them on the runway. It was thought that the fire might have damaged the bottom of these tanks during flight.

It was not possible to determine how the leaking kerosene caught fire. However, the accident report noted that the runways at Charles de Gaulle airport were only inspected on average twice a day, instead of three. And there was no systematic research into where the recovered debris came from. This would hardly have helped F-BTSC as the metal strip that caused the accident had been shed by an aircraft that had taken off just five minutes before. The maintenance technicians who left the spacer off Concorde’s bogie came in for criticism. But the oversight, though serious, did not contribute to the accident.

It was the loss of the wear strip from the thrust reverser door on the Continental Airlines DC-10 that was responsible. That fell off due to the lack of rigorous maintenance. Over a period of little more than a month, it had been replaced, then became detached and twisted and had been replaced again. This time the replacement part had not been made in accordance with the manufacturer’s specifications and fell off on 25 July 2000.

The accident report was published in 2002. Six years later, Concorde’s chief engineer Jacques Herubel, the head of the Concorde division of the French aircraft manufacturer Aérospatiale Henri Perrier, former employee of the French airline regulator Claude Frantzen, mechanic for Continental Airlines John Taylor and Continental maintenance manager Stanley Ford were charged with manslaughter. The trial began in January 2010. The prosecutors maintained that Aérospatiale had been aware of the design flaw that left the plane’s fuel tanks vulnerable since the accident in Washington, DC, in 1979. Working for France’s civil aviation authority responsible for the aircraft’s safety, Frantzen also knew of Concorde’s design flaw. Air France was not prosecuted and began a civil action against Continental after paying out $150 million in a settlement with the families of the victims.

After a trial that lasted five months, Continental Airlines was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and fined nearly $300,000. John Taylor, who made and installed the faulty wear strip, was given a fifteen-month prison sentence that was immediately suspended. Concorde returned to service briefly, but was then withdrawn permanently in 2003.

O
N
31 A
UGUST
1997, Diana, Princess of Wales, died as a result of injuries sustained when the car in which she was a passenger collided with a pillar in the Pont de l’Alma road tunnel in Paris. Her lover, Dodi al-Fayed, and the driver of the Mercedes-Benz S280, Henri Paul, were pronounced dead at the scene of the accident. The Princess of Wales was still alive following the crash but barely conscious. She was taken to the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital. Following emergency surgery she was pronounced dead at 4 a.m. local time. Al-Fayed’s bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones was taken to the same hospital with very serious injuries and after extensive treatment was released on Friday, 3 October. He was the only survivor. The media blamed the paparazzi who were pursuing the car. Several of them were arrested at the scene of the accident and charged with failing to render assistance to persons in danger – an offence in France.

An eighteen-month French judicial investigation concluded that the crash was caused by Henri Paul, who was driving under the influence of alcohol and drugs. He lost control of the car at high speed after colliding with a Fiat Uno. The investigating magistrates said that Diana and Dodi would have survived if they had been wearing their seat belts. They also decided to take no action against the paparazzi, saying: “Their behaviour is an issue for them, and the people they work for, about the moral and ethical rules of their work. But it does not constitute a breach of the penal law.”

However, Dodi’s father, Egyptian-born Mohamed al-Fayed, then the owner of Harrods and the Ritz hotel in Paris, insisted that the deaths of the princess and his son were the result of a conspiracy by the British establishment to save the monarchy from the embarrassment of a potential marriage between the mother of a future king and a Muslim.

It is alleged that Diana feared death in a car accident. Her onetime bodyguard and lover Barry Mannakee died in a motorbike accident shortly after being dismissed from his post when the affair was discovered. Diana told her voice coach Peter Settelen that she thought Mannakee had been murdered. Then ten months before her death, she wrote to her butler Paul Burrell claiming that “my husband is planning ‘an accident’ in my car, brake failure and serious head injury in order to make the path clear for him to marry”. The letter was reproduced in Burrell’s book,
A Royal Duty
. Burrell said that she had written it as an “insurance policy” in case of her death.

Mohamed al-Fayed also said that Princess Diana was frightened. A few weeks before her death, she told him that she had been threatened by Prince Philip. “Diana told me personally during a holiday in the south of France, ‘If anything happens to me, make sure those people are exposed. The person who is spearheading these threats is Prince Philip’,” al-Fayed said.

According to former MI6 agent Richard Tomlinson, British intelligence was planning a hit at the time. In a sworn deposition, he claimed the MI6 officer Dr Nicholas Bernard Frank Fishwick, who was in charge of Balkan operations, showed him plans to assassinate the Serbian leader President Slobodan Milosevic “by causing his personal limousine to crash”.

“Dr Fishwick proposed to arrange the crash in a tunnel,” said Tomlinson, “because the proximity of concrete close to the road would ensure that the crash would be sufficiently violent to cause death or serious injury, and would also reduce the possibility that there might be independent, casual witnesses. Dr Fishwick suggested that one way to cause the crash might be to disorientate the chauffeur using a strobe flashgun, a device which is occasionally deployed by special forces to, for example, disorientate helicopter pilots or terrorists, and about which MI6 officers are briefed during their training.” Tomlinson noted that the scenario bore “remarkable similarities to the circumstances and witness accounts of the crash that killed the Princess of Wales, Dodi al-Fayed, and Henri Paul”.

Mohamed al-Fayed had claimed that Diana’s planned assassination became urgent when it was discovered that the mother of the heir to the throne was pregnant by his son Dodi. The pregnancy was confirmed by a French police officer who spoke anonymously to the
Independent on Sunday
. The officer went on to say he had papers to substantiate his claim and said the pregnancy was not revealed at the time because it had nothing to do with the investigation into the cause of the deaths after a car crash. Mohamed al-Fayed went on to claim that the crash was an assassination ordered by Prince Philip and carried out by MI6 because the royal family “could not accept that an Egyptian Muslim could eventually be the stepfather of the future king of England”.

In an attempt to clear up these accusations, the Metropolitan Police began an investigation in January 2004 called Operation Paget. In December 2006, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner Lord Stevens published its 832-page report, which examined the crime scene evidence. The police used laser techniques to create an extremely detailed computer representation of the Pont de l’Alma underpass and its approach. Collision investigators of the Metropolitan Police Service and the Transport Research Laboratory then used this model to interpret the physical evidence left at the scene of the crash, such as tyre marks and the spread of vehicle debris. This showed how the Mercedes entered the underpass and crashed, supported by a comprehensive technical examination of the wreckage of the car, which was stored in containers outside Paris.

It was initially alleged that the speedometer of the Mercedes was stuck at 192 km/h (119 mph). However, the manufacturers insisted that the speedometer would have reverted to zero after the crash brought the car to a halt, as the French investigation had found. A photograph of the dashboard of the crashed car and the testimony of the investigating officer Captaine Francis Bechet confirmed this. However, when officers from Operation Paget examined the wreckage, they found that the needle was pointing to 231 km/h (144 mph), but the needle could be moved manually and would remain where it was placed. Neither the French investigators nor officers from Operation Paget found any physical marks or indentations on the face of the speedometer that would allow one to ascertain the reading on the instrument at the point of impact. The needle sometimes makes an indent on the speedometer face following a violent impact. All the other instruments on the dashboard had returned to zero, leaving no indication of their reading at the time of the crash.

After crash tests of similar Mercedes saloons, the manufacturers estimated that the speed of impact with the thirteenth pillar of the tunnel was 65 mph (105 km/h) +/– 5 per cent. The measurement of the tyre marks confirmed this.

Forensic accident investigator David Price examined the wreckage and went to the scene of the crash. He also studied the French crash report, and consulted the French technical experts and technicians from Daimler Chrysler who made the Mercedes. Examining the Mercedes brakes, he found the brake-pad sensor was out of position and road dirt had worn away where the sensor made contact, causing the warning light to flicker on and off, as reported by Olivier Lafaye, the car’s previous driver. The French examination had found that, “no fault capable of triggering the brake warning light on the instrument assembly was found”. However, the misplaced brake-pad sensor would have had no effect of the braking capability of the vehicle.

There were traces of water in the brake fluid. The French investigators found that this was due to prolonged exposure to air and would, again, have had no effect on the vehicle’s braking capability. The French investigators were puzzled that the gear selector was not in place. David Price concluded that it had been removed by the rescue services at the scene of the accident to give them more space.

Some of the car’s fuses were missing or blown, but none that controlled any critical systems. Some of the wiring was damaged, but none showed signs that they had been chaffed or had failed before the crash.

Captaine Bechet reported that the right front tyre was deflated when he examined the car at Nord Garage, MacDonald Boulevard, on 1 September, but when French technical investigators examined the car in October, it was inflated to 30 psi (2.1 bar). Price found a small cut in the side wall of the car. The tyre was no long airtight and when it was inflated to 32 psi (2.2 bar) it deflated to 10 psi (0.7 bar) within an hour, and to zero sometime within the following three hours. He concluded that, if the tyre was inflated to 30 psi, it must have been inflated shortly before the French experts had examined it. The nature of the cut indicated that it had been caused by damaged bodywork during the crash.