You might think passengers taking off or landing at Charles de Gaulle Airport would feel unsettled seeing a supersonic Concorde jet mounted on a steel frame alongside the runway, with its needle-like beak pointed upward in take-off position. After all, just such a Concorde plane crashed in a ball of fire nearly 10 years ago, less than two miles from where the mounted jet now stands. It was an event that doomed the world’s fastest-ever passenger jet — an aircraft designed by French and British engineers — to a future as a museum relic.
The French, however, do not quite feel humiliated. Wronged, perhaps, but not humiliated. In a trial that opens outside Paris on Tuesday, French officials will try to pin the blame for the Concorde’s demise on Continental Airlines. It was not, they insist, the Concorde’s design that led to its demise; indeed the plane still has cherished status among many in France as a feat of engineering and aesthetics, hence the monument at Charles de Gaulle.
