On 25 July 2000, an Air France Concorde crashed minutes after take-off from Charles de Gaulle airport. See how the Guardian reported events
An Air France Concorde carrying tourists bound for a luxury cruise slammed into a hotel shortly after takeoff at Paris’s main international airport yesterday, killing all 109 passengers and crew aboard and four people on the ground.
It was the first time in almost 30 years of service that the supersonic Concorde had suffered a catastrophic failure of its British-built engines. An extraordinary photograph taken by a Hungarian plane spotter on holiday in Paris shows that the aircraft was belching flames even as it left the runway at Charles de Gaulle.
Concordes get up to 250mph before lifting off, and there was speculation last night that although an engine had caught fire, the pilot was unable to abort takeoff because the runway was too short to stop.
Three minutes after takeoff, with flames shooting hundreds of feet from two of its engines, the Concorde banked left and ploughed nose first into a hotel, demolishing the three-storey structure. The pilot apparently struggled to put the flaming aircraft down in open fields beyond Gonesse, a small industrial town just beyond the runway.
It took up to 400 firefighters and police almost two hours to douse the flames from the blackened hulk of what was once the pride of the Air France fleet.
Leon Francesque, 40, said he watched the plane come over the lorry he was driving and flip over. “There was an explosion on the left side and then a second later on the right. After the second explosion the plane split in two.”
Antonio Ferreira was tending his garden when he said the Concorde’s engines suddenly fell silent. “It was like an atomic bomb, a mushroom cloud in the sky,” he said.
