A French appeals court on Thursday absolved Continental Airlines of blame for a 2000 Concorde crash that killed 113 people and cleared a mechanic at the U.S. airline of the charge of involuntary manslaughter.
The verdict comes over a decade after the accident helped to spell the end of the supersonic airliner. A previous court ruled that a small metal strip that fell onto the runway from a Continental aircraft just before the Concorde took off from Paris, caused the crash.
Continental was originally fined 200,000 euros and ordered to pay the Concorde's operator, Air France, a million euros in damages. Continental appealed the verdict which it described as unfair and absurd.
Welder John Taylor was cleared of a 15-month suspended prison sentence for having gone against industry norms and used titanium to forge the piece that dropped off the plane.
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