Air France says no question of selling Concorde

No Concorde sell off

PARIS, (Reuters) -- Air France said it had no plans to scrap its remaining five Concordes or sell them to British Airways as doubts grew about the future of its supersonic operations in the wake of last week's crash.

The French government grounded the company's Concordes after one of them ploughed into a hotel after take-off on July 25 from Paris's Roissy-Charles de Gaulle airport, killing 113 people.

The Transport Ministry is waiting for investigators to find out what happened before giving the jets a clean bill of health.

But with no official explanation yet, rumours have surfaced that Air France will be forced to abandon its supersonic service and sell its Concordes to British Airways -- the only other airline to operate the sleek, delta-winged jets.

Air France strongly denied such speculation.

"There is no foundation to talk of an early retirement (for Concorde)," a spokesman said. "There is no question of selling the aircraft to British Airways."

British Airways has seven Concordes and resumed its supersonic service within 24 hours of the Air France crash. It says its operations are profitable and with the plane no longer in production it cannot add to its aging fleet.

"British Airways dreams of enlarging its fleet and is ogling the unhappy planes Air France owns," the France Soir daily said.

A spokeswoman for British Airways declined to comment.

Two heavyweight French newspapers, Le Monde and Le Figaro, also pondered Concorde's future in editorials.

"All of a sudden some people are beginning to suspect that the French authorities are preparing (public) opinion for the abandonment of Concorde," Le Monde wrote.

Aviation experts have outlined a chain of events that led to the Concorde disaster, including a burst tyre, fire in a fuel tank and catastrophic engine failure. However, they still do not know what set the accident in motion.

Newspapers have speculated that debris from a burst tyre punctured a fuel tank, which then caught fire, crippling the two engines on the left wing.

Le Figaro published interviews with historians and philosophers who argued that the plane should be withdrawn, but the newspaper itself put up a spirited defence of the Anglo-French aircraft, which went into service in 1976.

"As man is not perfect, no machine built by human intelligence will be without fault. Zero risk does not exist. Concorde, this beautiful bird, does not deserve to be sacrificed on the altar of the principle of precaution," it wrote.

Copyright 2000 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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