French maintain ban on Concorde

French civil aviation authorities have stated that the ban would remain in place on flights of the Air France Concorde, the supersonic jet that was grounded last week after a crash killed 113 people.

French civil aviation authorities have stated that the ban would remain in place on flights of the Air France Concorde, the supersonic jet that was grounded last week after a crash killed 113 people.

The ban will remain in place because the sequence of events that led to the crash has yet to be determined and experts have not decided which extra safety measures to put in place, according to the General Direction for Civil Aviation, or DGAC.

Air France Flight 4590 crashed shortly after takeoff on July 25 just outside Paris, killing all 109 people on board and four people on the ground. Investigators said Monday it could take 18 months to determine what caused the Concorde to crash minutes after takeoff.

"We are at the beginning of a difficult investigation," said Alain Monnier, head of a special inquiry commission investigating the crash. "We have a certain number of elements that are certainties or quasi-certainties. But we still don't know how to construct a scenario that links all the events together."

These include evidence that one or two of the Concorde's tyres exploded and one of the plane's engines shut down, followed by the shutdown of another engine. In addition, the plane's undercarriage did not pull up and it had difficulty climbing into the sky, never achieving a sufficiently fast speed, said Paul Louis Arslanian, head of the Accident and Inquiry Office, which is working with the inquiry commission, along with U.S. experts from the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Authority. "We also found evidence of fuel leakage. It was this leak that eventually caught fire. This was the cause of the fire," Arslanian said.

The Accident and Inquiry Office said that the flames spewing from the side of the aircraft before it crashed had most likely come from a "major fuel leak" and that part of the fuel tank had been discovered on the runway. The office had said earlier it believed the fire did not start in the plane's engines.

In a separate meeting, British and French aviation officials examined how to improve safety in hopes of getting the grounded Concorde fleet airborne again. Representatives from the DGAC, British and French engine manufacturers Rolls-Royce and Air France attended the meeting.

Immediately following the crash, Air France grounded its fleet of five remaining Concordes. British Airways, the only other airline to operate Concordes, resumed flights on most of its seven supersonic jets the day after the crash. On Sunday, a British Airways Concorde flying from London to New York with 57 passengers and nine crew members had to make an emergency stop in eastern Canada after the plane's captain smelled gasoline in the cabin, the airline said.

It was the second problem with one of British Airways' supersonic luxury jets on Sunday, and the third in two days.

Despite the weekend's incidents, British Airways said it expected to continue operating regular service out of London and New York. "We wouldn't be flying unless we thought it was safe," said British Airways spokeswoman Jemma Moore in London.

Xavier Salvat, the prosecutor in charge of the judicial inquiry, said 90 victims had been autopsied and 21 had been identified. The bodies will be released to the families upon identification, a statement said. Four doctors, two radiologists and five dentists were helping with the identification at France's main forensic institute in Paris, the statement said.

Prosecutors have questioned a number of people in connection with the inquiry and a "great number" of pieces of the aircraft have been recovered, Salvat said.