Posted at 7:53 a.m. PDT Sunday, July 30, 2000

BA Concorde flight delayed after fault found LONDON (Reuters) - A British Airways Concorde flight to New York was delayed for over an hour at Heathrow airport Sunday after a technical fault forced the airline to use a backup plane, a spokeswoman said.

The flight had been due to leave London Heathrow at 10:30 a.m., the spokeswoman said. But after a fault was discovered with a refueling system on the supersonic aircraft that was scheduled to make the flight, another Concorde jet was used instead.

The flight eventually took off at 11:45 a.m.

``There was a problem with aircraft refueling. The passengers, there were 51 of them, hadn't actually boarded, so we put them on a substitute aircraft,'' she said.

``We always have a standby Concorde ready.''

She had no further details about the technical fault but said it was specific to the plane involved and did not mean the rest of the fleet had to be checked.

British Airways has seven Concorde jets. It suspended its Concorde flights Tuesday after an Air France Concorde crashed near Paris, killing 114 people.

But while the remaining French Concordes are still grounded pending an investigation into the Paris crash, British Airways resumed normal Concorde service across the Atlantic on Wednesday.

``We resumed because we were convinced they were safe to operate,'' the British Airways spokeswoman said.

She said passenger loads had been ``the same as you would expect'' at this time of year.

http://www.sjmercury.com/world/worldwire/docs/255997l.htm

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), July 30, 2000