Timetable set for Concorde flights

LONDON, England -- Commercial Concorde flights could resume in September more than a year after the crash near Paris in which 113 people died, an Anglo-French Concorde working group has said.

The flights are being planned by British Airways, with Air France planning to resume commercial flights a month later.

The Concorde working group is made up of senior government transport officials and civil aviation authorities. It said the plane's makers hoped to submit the results of tests on the modified plane to regulators by August 15.

"BA (BAY.L) is aiming to resume commercial flights in September, while Air France (AIRF.PA) aims to restart commercial flights when the next IATA season starts in October," it said after a meeting in London.

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But a BA spokeswoman was more cautious, telling Reuters the company had no more exact date than "late summer."

"We don't want to be putting an exact time-scale on things when we've still got some factors to work through," she said.

The statement from the working group came as it emerged that new tests have bolstered theories that the tragic chain of events which caused the may have been set off by a metal strip on the runway.

Photographs taken in Houston, the United States base of Continental Airlines, have helped with the identification of a strip found on the runway after the crash, France's Accident Investigation Bureau (BEA) said in a statement.

Monday's statement said that new tests have "established a close relation between the metallic strip and the joint area on the cowl on engine 3 of the Continental Airlines DC-10."

Continental officials said they were studying the report but would not comment in detail on the accident while the investigation was still under way.

"We remain convinced that Continental was not responsible for the Concorde crash," company spokesman Nick Britton told The Associated Press from London.

Investigators believe that one of the supersonic jet's tyres burst after running over a stray object just before take-off, sending shards of rubber flying into fuel tanks and rupturing them leading to the fatal fire.

All 109 passengers and crew on board, along with four people on the ground around Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, were killed in last year's crash.

In a report in December, authorities said they were "quasi-certain" that the metallic piece came from a Continental jet that had taken off from the same runway as the doomed Concorde.

All the luxury jets have been grounded in the wake of the tragedy but last week a British Airways Concorde successfully completed the first supersonic test flight since the crash.

Each of the company's seven Concordes is being fitted with new Kevlar-rubber fuel tank liners to avoid any repetition of the accident with the wiring in the undercarriage strengthened and new, stronger, tyres fitted.

The decision on when Concorde can resume commercial flights ultimately rests with the CAA and its French counterpart which will grant the aircraft an air worthiness certificate.

The BEA has said it hopes to finish the investigation and publish a final report "in the coming months."