Adieu and Farewell?

By SALLY B. DONNELLY

A few years ago, Air France told the National Air and Space Museum in Washington that it would consider donating a Concorde when the aircraft's flying days were over. Those days may have come. Last week British Airways and Air France, the only two airlines that operate the 12 remaining supersonic Concordes, were forced by British and French regulators to ground their planes. And given the expensive measures likely to be required to prove its flightworthiness, the plane may never fly in regular service again.

The Concorde's grounding came after British and French authorities investigating the July 25 crash of Air France's Flight 4590 that killed 113 people reached a preliminary conclusion that the accident was set in motion by a ruptured tire. Pierced by a strip of metal, the tire virtually exploded, sending bits of rubber into the huge fuel tanks in the Concorde's wings. "It is clear to us all that a tire burst alone should never cause a loss of a public-transport aircraft," said Sir Malcolm Field, head of Britain's Civil Aviation Authority. The British say the Concordes are to remain parked until "appropriate measures" are taken to guarantee the tires' safety.

The British pilots' union said it has "very real doubts" about the necessity of the grounding given that British Airways' planes have improvements that the Air France fleet does not. According to financial analysts, the Concorde has also been a moneymaker for BA, contributing around $300 million to annual revenues and about $30 million to operating profits. Air France squeaked out an estimated $2 million in profit on $125 million in revenues last year.

Yet even if the cause of the accident is pinpointed, fixing the plane to the satisfaction of British and French regulators will add to the cost of operating the aircraft, already among the most expensive aircraft to operate in history. The Boeing 747, by contrast, carries four times as many people as the Concorde but costs half as much to maintain. The fixes to the supersonic plane could include tires that resist rupture and explosion, reinforcing the protection of fuel tanks and perhaps coating the underside of the wings with tough materials like kevlar. Even minor changes would be uneconomical. Says R.E.G. Davies, curator of air transport at the National Air and Space Museum, who has written a book on the Concorde: "If it needs yet more money spent on it to make it safe, this is the end of an era."

Worse still for the Concorde is the damage to its prestige that the crash and the grounding have caused. People paid thousands of dollars more than for regular airliners to fly the Concorde, not only for its speed but also for bragging rights. "The Concorde meant getting pampered," says Richard Aboulafia, an aviation analyst at the Teal Group in Fairfax, Va. "Uncertainty about the plane eliminates part of the cachet that was crucial to the Concorde's success."

--With reporting by Bruce Crumley/Paris and Kate Noble/London

With reporting by Bruce Crumley/Paris and Kate Noble/London