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Air France, Concorde Families Reach "Holding" Deal
Air France and lawyers representing families of the victims of the July Concorde disaster have reached a holding accord on interim compensation ahead of talks on a full settlement, the two sides said on Friday in Paris.
The lawyers had hoped to strike a one-stop payment deal but Air France said it needed more time to try to seek terms with other companies that investigators believe might have played a part in the July 25 disaster, which killed 113 people.
In the meantime, the French national carrier said in a statement that it and its insurers had agreed "in the days ahead" to top up an initial 140,000 franc ($18,670) payment given to the families for each dead relative.
No precise financial details were released.
"This is a holding agreement on the methodology, which envisages certain payments, but is not final," said Gerard Samet, one of the relatives' lawyers who attended the meeting.
He told Reuters that the families of the victims would hold talks in the German city of Cologne on November 11.
An Air France Concorde crashed in flames into a hotel shortly after take-off from Paris's Charles de Gaulle airport, killing all 109 aboard and four people on the ground. Most of the dead were German tourists.
A preliminary investigators' report said one of the supersonic jet's tyres, made by Goodyear, had burst on the runway, sending debris flying into the fuel tanks and sparking the cataclysmic fire.
Investigators believe the tyre was punctured by a strip of metal lying on the runway, which had probably fallen off a DC-10 aircraft owned by Continental Airlines.
Air France said on Friday it would "do everything possible to lead the parties in the case -- Aerospatiale, Goodyear, Continental Airlines and others -- to finalise a global compensation deal by February 28, 2001".
France's aerospace company Aerospatiale was part of a Franco-British team that designed the Concorde.
Speaking before the meeting, one of the German lawyers, Gerhart Baum, said the legal teams were looking for separate compensation packages.
"The individual cases vary enormously, so there must be individual compensation settlements. We shall have to establish a common basis (for these settlements), but I can't talk about specific numbers," he told Berlin's InforRadio.
He said the French government also bore some responsibility in the case. "The Concorde plane was licensed by the French government and Air France is majority owned by the state. This responsibility must be seen," he said.
Baum has previously indicated that if the families' demands were not met, they might join a legal action opened in a court in Miami in the United States by Martin Gulduer, the son of one of the victims -- William Gulduer.
Filing suits in the United States is seen as more lucrative than doing so in Europe. Lawyers for Martin Gulduer are seeking more than $75,000 and say they can sue in the United States because that was the doomed flight's destination.
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