On July 25, 2000, an Air France Concorde passenger jet on an international charter flight from Charles de Gaulle Airport, Paris to John F Kennedy Airport, New York, crashed shortly after takeoff into a hotel in nearby Gonesse, in the Val-d’Oise department, in the north-eastern suburbs of Paris.
All nine crew members and 100 passengers on board, as well as four people in the hotel, perished. It was the only fatal Concorde accident in its 27-year operational history.
The flight was chartered by a German company, Peter Deilmann Cruises. Most of the passengers were German tourists heading to New York to board the cruise ship MS Deutschland for a 16-day cruise to Manta, Ecuador.
The Aérospatiale-BAC Concorde aircraft, serial number 203, was 25 years old. The aircraft made its maiden flight on January 31, 1975. It was powered by four Rolls-Royce Olympus 593-610 turbojet engines, each of which was equipped with afterburners.
The aircraft’s last scheduled maintenance check took place on July 21, 2000, four days before the accident. No significant defects were reported. At the time of the crash, the aircraft had flown 11,989 hours and had made 4,873 take-offs and landings.
Five minutes before the Concorde departed, Continental Airlines Flight 55, a McDonnell Douglas DC-10-30, took off from the same runway at Charles de Gaulle Airport for Newark International Airport and lost a titanium alloy wear strip that was part of the engine cowl.
During its take-off run and while the aircraft was doing 185 mph, the Concorde ran over the titanium wear strip, cutting the right front tyre of its left main wheel bogie.
Tire fragments, launched upwards at an estimated speed of 140 metres per second by the rapidly spinning wheel, violently struck the underside of the left wing, damaging parts of the landing gear, preventing its retraction.
High-speed tyre debris did not directly puncture any of the fuel tanks, but it sent out a pressure shockwave that ruptured the number five fuel tank at its weakest point, just ahead of the left landing-gear well.
Large amounts of fuel leaking from the rupture ignited, causing a loss of thrust in the left-hand-side engines one and two.
Leaking fuel gushing out from the bottom of the wing was most likely ignited either by an electric arc in the landing gear bay due to debris cutting the landing gear wire or through contact with hot parts of the engine.
Engines one and two surged and lost all power, likely due to ingestion of hot gases in both engines, and tyre debris in engine one only.
Engine one slowly recovered over the next few seconds. A large plume of flame developed, and the flight engineer shut down engine two in response to a fire warning and the captain’s command.
An air traffic controller at Charles de Gaulle Airport noticed the flames before the Concorde was airborne and informed the flight crew.
[caption id="attachment_1074992" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Air France’s Concorde aircraft[/caption]
However, the aircraft had already attained the V1 decision speed
