Concorde - cleared to fly again
Concorde has been cleared to fly again after the British Civil Aviation Authority and its French equivalent, the DGAC, agreed to return the aircraft’s certificate of airworthiness, British Airways said today.
The clearance follows last summer's crash near Paris when 109 people were killed.
Air France grounded its Concorde fleet immediately after one of its jets crashed minutes after take-off from Paris in July 2000. The dead included 100 passengers, mostly tourists from Germany, the crew of nine and four people on the ground.
British Airways kept flying Concorde between New York and London until mid-August of last year, withdrawing service just before the two governments withdrew the certificate permitting it to fly.
Investigators believe a stray strip of metal on the runway punctured one of the plane's high-pressure tyres, which blew a hole in a wing fuel tank and started a fire.
