At least five people were killed and three others injured
when the roof of a walkway that had opened just 11 months ago collapsed at Paris'
main Charles de Gaulle airport, officials said.
"Rescue workers are still working to clear the rubble, so we have five
victims, maybe six. Nothing's certain yet," Paris airport authority (ADP)
president Pierre Graff told a news conference.
Several tonnes of concrete, metal bars and glass panelling came crashing down
on an arrival and departure passageway at the airport's futuristic Terminal
2E shortly before 7:00 am (0500 GMT), strewing rubble over a 30-meter (-yard)
area.
A section of the glass-encased walkway caved in, falling onto service vehicles
parked below.
The new terminal was inaugurated only last June, amid delays caused by security
concerns and trade union accusations that management was rushing the completion
deadlines for the building.
Laurent Vibert, a spokesman for the fire service, described the scene as "a
disaster zone, like an earthquake".
Rescue teams with sniffer dogs were called in to search the rubble for survivors.
None of the wounded suffered life-threatening injuries.
Police officers were direct witnesses to the disaster as it struck. They were
on the scene, having spotted dust coming from a crack in the roof about 25 minutes
before if collapsed and were trying to cordon off the area. Officials said that
none had been injured.
French President Jacques Chirac expressed his "deepest sympathies"
for the families of the victims and was joined by Prime Minister Jean-Pierre
Raffarin, who will go to Charles de Gaulle on Monday, in calling for an immediate
investigation.
Prosecutors launched an inquiry to find out who or what was responsible for
the casualties. Graff said an administrative probe would also be launched Monday.
"ADP is absolutely open about this. I want the truth (about what caused
the disaster) to be known as quickly as possible. We want to know and understand,"
he said.
Paul Andreu, the architect who designed the terminal was expected back in Paris
Monday after learning about the accident during a visit to China, Graff added.
"The architect and engineers are stunned," he said.
Interior Minister Dominique de Villepin, speaking from the scene of the accident,
said both Chirac and Raffarin "want the inquiry to get under way as quickly
as possible".
Transport Minister Gilles de Robien ruled out the possibility of an attack,
but said that the real causes were still unclear.
The investigation was likely to concentrate on faults in the terminal design
or possible short-cuts taken in the construction.
The walkway roof collapsed as Air France flights from Newark (eds: correct)
and Johannesburg had just arrived and another to Prague was just about to depart
-- had it occurred at a peak travel time and not on a Sunday morning, the toll
could have been far higher.
The terminal was immediately evacuated and some 200 firefighters backed by police
and army officers were rushed to the site.
An unidentified Asian man and a Czech woman were among the dead and a Chinese
and an Ivorian woman were among the injured.
So far no French nationals have been found among the dead and injured, said
ADP chief doctor Michel Clerel.
The identity and nationality of the other victims were not immediately known.
The accident caused the delay of dozens of Air France flights and the diversion
of several others to the other main airport in Paris, Orly. Terminal 2E is used
by the SkyTeam alliance, which along with Air France groups Aeromexico, Alitalia,
CSA Czech Airlines, Delta and Korean Air.
Graf apologized for the inconvenience caused to passengers and airlines due
to the accident.
The opening of the terminal, the latest addition to the burgeoning Paris hub,
was delayed for a week last June after fire officials and engineers ruled that
safety norms had not been met -- an overhead light had lost its fittings and
crashed down during an inspection tour.
Management at ADP, a state-owned body which runs Paris airports, subsequently
blamed the delay on the workforce -- prompting an angry reaction from the CGT
union, which accused Air France management and ADP of setting an unrealistic
deadline for the opening.
"Everyone knew -- from the progress of the work -- that (the deadline)
was unreasonable," the CGT said.
Terminal 2E plays a vital role in plans by ADP and Air France to transform Charles
de Gaulle into Europe's primary air hub, ahead of London's Heathrow and Frankfurt.
Built at a cost of 750 million euros (900 million dollars), it consists of a
450-meter (1,500-foot) sleekly curving central body leading to a 650-meter jetty
which serves as the departure area, from which 17 hallways take passengers to
their aircraft.
Graff said the terminal handles seven million passengers a year and about 20,000
on a normal day, with plans for expansion to 10 million by the end of this year
A catastrophic chain of human error, system failures and
technical problems led to a mid-air collision that killed 71 people over southern
Germany two years ago, an official inquiry concluded.
The Swiss air traffic control company Skyguide, which was partly blamed for
the crash, said it accepted responsibility for its mistakes, and a lawyer for
relatives of some of the dead called for a swift agreement on compensation.
The collision occured late on July 1, 2002 between a DHL cargo plane and a Russian
passenger jet carrying mainly children on holiday to Spain.
"Skyguide assumes full responsibility for its errors and asks relatives
of the 71 victims for forgiveness," the company said in a statement.
It said it was implementing recommendations made by German authorities over
the past 22 months and taking other technical measures to boost safety.
The privatized firm said that its chief executive, Alain Rossier, "accepts
the mistakes by air traffic control and will do everything with his staff to
ensure that such an accident does not happen again."
Swiss President Joseph Deiss also apologized for the government's role in the
disaster in a letter to his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin.
In the letter, Deiss expressed "deep regret" over the incident and
promised that Switzerland would take its responsibilities, "including before
the law", according to a statement from the Swiss federal chancellery.
The 123-page report by Germany's federal air accident investigations board shared
out responsibility for the crash.
Joerg Schoeneberg, who headed the inquiry, said the immediate causes of the
crash were "amplified by outside factors."
His report found that an overworked air traffic operator in the Swiss city of
Zurich -- a 36-year-old Danish national who was stabbed to death earlier this
year in a suspected revenge attack -- failed to notice the collision course
in time.
That was partly due to a faulty warning mechanism. Attempts by a fellow air
traffic operator in Karlsruhe, southwest Germany, to alert him failed because
of a defective telephone system.
When the Zurich controller finally noticed, he gave the wrong instructions,
the report said.
Skyguide had also failed properly to manage the night shift, tolerating a system
that led to only one person being on duty at the time of the collision because
colleagues were resting.
The crew of the Bashkirian Airlines Tupolev, insufficiently experienced in using
its automatic TCAS on-board warning system, also erred by ignoring "all
recognized procedures" and failing to obey its instruction to climb.
Obeying the instruction "would certainly have prevented an accident,"
but instead they followed the controller's erroneous order to lose height.
"This accident happened because many events and circumstances, actions
and lack of action came together which, taken individually, would have had only
a minimal significance for air traffic safety," the report concluded.
Following the death of the Danish air controller, the chief remaining suspect
is a Russian who lost most of his family in the crash.
The disaster claimed the lives of all 69 passengers and crew on the Tupolev,
mostly children and teenagers, as well as two on the Boeing cargo plane.
Gerrit Wilmans, a lawyer for the relatives of 40 of the victims, said the report
showed there were grounds to launch a lawsuit in the United States for compensation.
He told AFP that the American company Honeywell that installed the TCAS in the
Tupolev had made "quite clear product errors".
"We feel fully confirmed (in our belief) that there is a liability in the
United States," he said, pointing also to a defect in the telephone system.
Wilmans said that if there was no settlement, lawyers would open a lawsuit in
the next month.
Both the Boeing and the Tupolev were fitted with the TCAS system, but the operating
instructions for the Russian crew were confusing and failed clearly to state
that in case of a conflict between the automatic system and the air traffic
controller, the TCAS had priority, the report said.
Last year, Germany, Switzerland and Skyguide announced their agreement on a
50-million-dollar (40-million-euro) compensation fund for relatives of the dead.
