It looks like this may well become a long-running series.

Following on the heels of private citizen Tony Blair yesterday, here’s corporate citizen Continental Airlines:

US airline Continental and five individuals go on trial in France … over the crash of an Air France Concorde nearly 10 years ago.

The jet took off in flames from Paris Charles de Gaulle airport and crashed minutes later, killing 113 people.

An official report said Concorde had hit a metal strip from a Continental plane that had taken off earlier.

But Continental’s lawyers say they can prove the supersonic jet caught fire before it struck the titanium strip.

The stricken Concorde flight 4590 crashed in the town of Gonesse in July 2000, hitting a hotel and killing four people there as well as all 109 on board.

Most of the passengers were German tourists heading to New York to join a luxury cruise to the Caribbean. Nine French crew members also died.

The entire fleet of Concordes was grounded until an inquiry established that one of the plane’s tyres had burst, causing debris to shoot out and rupture a fuel tank.
[...]
Investigators said the 43cm (17in) metal strip had fallen from the engine casing of a Continental Airlines DC-10 and in March 2008 a French public prosecutor asked judges to bring manslaughter charges.

Houston-based Continental Airlines is denying responsibility.

Olivier Metzner, a lawyer for Continental, said he would challenge the official view that the metal strip led to the crash.

“We are going to fight it and establish that the Concorde caught fire eight seconds before this scrap of metal met with the Concorde – so about 700m (2,300ft) before,” he said.

It sounds like Continental Airlines is going to argue, with a perfectly straight face, for this sequence of events:

Concorde catches fire (for no apparent reason, unless you count legal necessity)

scrap of metal “meets with” Concorde

one of the plane’s tires bursts

debris shoots out and ruptures the fuel tank, which would normally cause a fire, except that by the grace of the gods that watch over American airlines, the plane was already on fire

Presumably, Olivier Metzner will end with the claim that Continental’s role was confined to helpfully accelerating the fire, thereby making the inevitable deaths of the passengers more instantaneous and merciful.

If you have frequent flyer miles with Continental, you might want to consider cashing them in ASAP.

And unless you think life is incomplete without becoming the victim of at least one huge corporate bankruptcy, you might consider not buying any tickets on Continental until the lawsuit is resolved.