Ariane 5

FLIGHT 501 FAILURE

Welcome to the Ariane 5 accident web site.  This site brings together resources previously printed on paper to give you an intuitive insight into the contributors, and correlated events that led to the failure of Flight 501 on 4 June 1996.  It is designed to be easy to use, and accessible to everyone with a serious interest in analysing and understanding the failure of Flight 501.  It is assumed that users of the web site are comfortable with web page navigation, in particular that you are able to use hyperlinks.  You are not expected to catch on to using this site immediately - we'd expect that you take time to play around with it to get the most out of it.

To start using the report now, click here or go to the table of contents.  Interested readers can read the foreword for this report by the Chairman of the inquiry board, Prof. J. L. Lions.

To help you find your way around the web site, you may wish to understand how it is organised to help you get better use out of it.  Furthermore, the structure of this website may be of use to readers interested in developing other accident reports on the web into more intuitive tools for accident analysis.

To find your way around this web site, there are a number of tools available to help you:

• A table of contents.  This contains links to the various events in text format.  You can access this from the bottom of every page.
• A simple text searching facility.  This returns a list of all of the pages that contain the entered search text.  To get the most out of this, you'll need to be fairly specific, e.g. search for something like H0 + 22 rather than say, SRI which is used throughout the report.  This is on the contents page.
• The rocket image map on the left.  Clicking different areas of the rocket brings up selected events.
• The timeline image map below.  Clicking a cross on the timeline links to that particular event.

Please note that these web pages contain the same information as contained in the original accident report.  No attempt at analysis or argumentative discussion of the content has been made, other than that already present in the original.  This web site merely attempts to visualise the accident using techniques that give the reader a broader understanding of the accident's roots and the subsequent findings of the inquiry board.