Concorde Crash: Mechanical and Personnel Errors

Health Care
Accident Investigation

Introduction
• An Air France Concorde Flight 4590 that was heading to New York
from Paris killed 4 people on the ground and 109 passengers
(Riding, 2000 n.d).
• This was the first Concorde crash since the plane which is
recognised as the worlds supersonic undergone through a
commercial operation that was performed in 1976.
• According to the witnesses, either one or both Concorde’s left
engine was seen smoking heavily then burst in a fire as the plane
sped down the airstrip.
• The plane is said to have failed to gain an altitude whereby it
swayed to the left and later it crashed and demolished the
restaurant and hotel that was nine miles to the Northeast Paris.
•My job role at Concorde Maintenance as the stakeholder and was to
engage in the periodic checks for concorde and it was the most
important to ensure all damaged parts of concorde were repaired.

Mechanical Failure(Findings and
recommendations)
• The first human error identified is that there was a mechanical failure as
the mechanics did not follow proper maintenance guidelines such as flight
controls and locking mechanisms (Bubbico, Carbone, Ramírez-Camacho,
Pastor and Casal, 2016 p.95).
• As the Concorde Maintenance, my most crucial part of the job is to ensure
that the concorde does not have any mechanical problems that would lead
to fatal accidents.
• Notably, as the Concorde Maintenance stakeholder, I may have overlooked
the fact that a Concorde needs faster takeoff than other airplanes which
caused to the malfunction of the engine that was beyond the pilot’s control
and he opted to take a sudden emergency landing.
• However, the Airplane France Concorde 4590 had passed the V1 speed
which is considered as unsafe even though it failed to gain enough speed.
• The three engines were damaged and the plane could not accelerate and
the accident investigators argued that safe landing was unlikely to happen
for Air France Concorde Flight 4590.