STATES OF EMERGENCY - Patrick Lagadec

Cl. Frantzen, L. du Boullay: The DC-10 crisis 129specialists hadn't succeeded in getting this message heard by the legal system.However, at last there was the outline of an explanation: it was a maintenanceproblem. That's what made it possible for Europe to build a completelyunanimous position.P.L.: One difficult questioned remained: vis-à-vis the media, how to getthe planes flying again? How did you handle that?CL. FRANTZEN: That marked the beginning of a new phase, the process ofbeginning to fly again. We benefited from several favorable circumstances, bywhich I mean European-level meetings that had already been scheduled. OnJune 12, the directors general of civil aviation were to meet in Strasbourg forthe general assembly of the European Civil Aviation Conference, which is asort of club for directors general of civil aviation authorities. They were allthere, and they could back each other up, provided that we technicians couldget them to talk about the matter.L. DU BOULLAY: The problem was, we were faced with an unknownscenario: how not to follow the decision made by a manufacturing country.CL. FRANTZEN: On what legal grounds could our action be founded?L. DU BOULLAY: We worked a lot on that point, in each country. We couldsense that we had to find a mechanism for making a group decision.CL. FRANTZEN: In legal terms, the French situation was pretty simple,because our system is actually fairly well organized. It gives us full autonomyin decision-making. Intellectually and legally, our approach always starts withthe results from the original manufacturing country, but it also allows forincorporating variations. This means we can say, "I'll do more than them, I'lldo less, I'll do things differently." If we push it to the limit, this even lets usdecide to fly anyway, but under such-and-such conditions. So legally, we hadfull powers to start flying the planes again. In contrast, it was unfortunatelywritten into the regulations governing some of our European colleagues - I'mthinking of the Swedes, if memory serves - that for an imported plane, allthey could do was validate a foreign type certificate. Since there was no moreAmerican type certificate, they were grounded. So they had to build anincredibly contorted legal argument: they looked closely at the regulation andsaw that nowhere did it state that this certificate had to come from themanufacturing country. So they decided to validate a French type certificate.This wasn't the only example.L. DU BOULLAY: In other words, things moved very far very fast foreveryone as a whole.CL. FRANTZEN: The problem was getting all these steps into sync. TheEuropean decision had to be adopted on the same day, at the same time, on thebasis of the same inspections, which had been repeated unanimously by all ourairlines. The European planes began flying again on June 19. As soon as wordof the European action began to get around, it raised tremendous interest allover the world. The very same day, there was a meeting at Charles de Gaulleairport to explain our position to a number of third countries which werestarting to say that maybe the Europeans were right after all. The first toarrive were the Japanese, who were slightly perplexed by the disarray of the