Certaines fibrations en surfaces quadriques réelles

We consider the question whether a real threefold X fibred into quadric surfaces over the real projective line is stably rational (over R) if the topological space X® is connected. We give a counterexample. When all geometric fibres are irreducible, the question is open. We investigate a family of such fibrations for which the intermediate jacobian technique is not available. We produce two independent methods which in many cases enable one to prove decomposition of the diagonal.