The 100 passengers who boarded Air France flight 4590 from Paris Charles de Gaulle to New York JFK on the afternoon of 25 July 2000 believed they were in for the trip of a lifetime. The German cruise line Peter Deillmann had chartered Concorde for a supersonic start to a cruise holiday from New York to Ecuador.
While they sipped champagne and waited for departure, three miles west of the airport in the village of Gonesse, the staff of a budget hotel – the Hotelissimo Les Relais Bleus – were at work as normal.
For the two pilots and the flight engineer, as well as the six cabin crew, it was a routine mission. While Concorde had never proved a commercial success on its scheduled routes to the US, Brazil or Venezuela, there was plenty of demand for such charter flights.
Five minutes before the supersonic jet began its take-off along runway 26R, a Continental Airlines DC-10 had lost a titanium strip from one of its engines during take off from the same runway. While that flight was unaffected, this small piece of debris began a sequence of events that would end in tragedy within 90 seconds.
Thirty-four seconds after beginning the take-off roll, at a speed of 185mph, Concorde ran over the metal strip. It cut one of the tyres on the left-hand landing gear, sending a 10lb chunk of rubber into the left wing – where some of the 95 tons of fuel for the journey was stored.
A tank was ruptured. As the fuel gushed out, it was ignited “by an electric arc in the landing gear bay or through contact with hot parts of the engine”, according to the the official report.
At this point the supersonic plane was still on the ground. But Concorde had passed “V1” – the speed beyond which it is not possible safely to reject a take-off . For this flight V1 was calculated to be 173mph.
Concorde left the ground. But hindered by drag from the undercarriage – which could not be retracted because of the damage – the aircraft was catastrophically short of power and out of control. Despite the pilots’ best efforts, the aircraft stalled and struck the hotel. The impact killed all 109 passengers and crew on the plane, as well as four hotel staff.
“At first, the details were sketchy,” recalls Kay Burley. She was on air, presenting Sky News.
“A producer was in my ear, calmly feeding me the basics: a Concorde had…
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