The company and engineers accused of negligently causing a Concorde supersonic jet to crash outside Paris with the loss of 113 lives went on trial for a second time today.
A previous prosecution after the 2000 disaster found US carrier Continental and one of its employees guilty of allowing a sliver of metal to fall from one of its jets onto a runway, where it burst the tyre of the Air France Concorde.
But four French defendants were cleared -- in a 2010 ruling that Continental denounced as French "protectionism" -- and prosecutors demanded a second trial at which all six accused parties once more face prosecution.
The trial began in Versailles, outside Paris, on Thursday and was to continue until May 9, as judges reconsider technical evidence about the 12-year-old crash and the design and safety record of an obsolete plane.
The court ruled that two elderly French defendants would be tried separately from the others early next year.
"This case has been tainted from the start," Continental's lawyer Olivier Metzner told journalists on arriving at the court.
"Air France, a civil party, could have been among the accused if some experts hadn't been former Air France employees," he said.
Air France lawyer Fernand Garnault said: "Continental is trying to blame Air France."
"We're here to fight Continental's aim of blaming Air France instead, at least in the media," he said.
One of Air France's fleet of Concordes, a triumph of Franco-British engineering and long a symbol of transatlantic luxury travel, burst into flames shortly after take-off north of Paris on July 25, 2000.
All 100 mainly German passengers and nine crew on the New York-bound flight were killed along with four people on the ground in the Paris suburb of Gonesse, where the burning wreckage smashed into a hotel.
The first trial came to an end in 2010, with Continental Airlines and one of its employees found guilty of negligent maintenance in allowing the 40 centimetres (16-inch) shard of metal to fall from a DC10 jet onto the runway at Charles de Gaulle airport.
This was said at the trial to have pierced the Concorde's tyre, causing it to burst and damage a fuel tank in the plane's wing, triggering in turn a leak and an explosion that destroyed the jet in flight.
Continental's lawyers denied this, insisting that witness testimony showed the jet was already on fire when it passed the point where the metal had fallen.
Metzner said he would cite 18 witnesses who said they "saw the Concorde in flames before the shard of metal."
And lawyers for the victims accused airlines and safety authorities of ignoring what they alleged were longstanding design flaws in the jet.
But judges at the first trial found Continental guilty of negligence, fined it 200,000 euros and ordered it to pay a million euros in damages to Air France, which had previously compensated the families of the dead passengers.
It also convicted 44-year-old Continental engineer John Taylor of negligence in using titanium to repair the defective metal strip that fell from the DC10, arguing that this was an unsuitable material.
He was given a 15-month suspended sentence. His supervisor, 72-year-old Stanley Ford was cleared, despite admitting he had failed to inspect the suspect repair.
Three elderly French aerospace executives were also tried and cleared.
Henri Perrier, 82, directed Concorde's test flights from 1976, and was head of the jet's programme at plane-maker Aerospatiale until 1994. He denied ignoring evidence of a weakness in Concorde from a 1979 accident.
Perrier's lawyer said he would not attend Thursday's hearing due to ill health, and called for the case to be dropped.
The court rejected his call, but ruled that the trial would take place in two stages.
"Rejecting the entirety of this matter would be tantamount to accepting that this trial never takes place, given the uncertain evolution of Mr Perrier's health," judge Michele Luga said.
As a result, the retrial of Perrier and Jacques Herubel, 76, who worked as an engineer for Perrier between 1993 and 1995, will now take place on January 23, 2013.
Metzner said the court's solution meant the current trial would amount to "a trial of the Americans".
The Concorde was taken out of service soon after the accident by Air France and its other operator, British Airways, and the era of supersonic air travel came to an end against a background of environmental concerns and rising fuel costs.