What brought down the Concorde?

Peter Greenberg Travel contributor • Profile

The Concorde was called many things in its lifetime: sleek, sexy, supersonically sublime.

Ricky Bastin: It was the speed. It was the grace. It was the pace.

A magnificent flying machine that cruised at Mach two: twice the speed of sound. It was iconic -- even ironic. That needle nose -- retractable too. Those delta wings.

Mike Bannister: You could do things with Concorde clearly you can't do with other airplanes. Fabulous airplane to fly.

Poetry in motion. Elegance in action. And fast, fast, fast.

Christie Brinkley: It just made the world so much more accessible. It's always exciting to get to ny before you've left and do a full day's work.

It was a show-stopper. A name-dropper.

Joan Collins: There's lots of people like me, who love this aircraft

And almost always -- almost everywhere -- the Concorde was a crowd-pleaser.

During 24 years of commercial flying, the Concorde never had a single crash.... until Tuesday, July 25th, 2000. It was horrifying -- and utterly unexpected.

All told, 113 people died when the Concorde fell out of the sky and smashed into a small hotel in a Paris suburb. Something else died that day: a dream, a supersonic dream.

It's been nearly a decade since the Concorde crashed into that small hotel. But last year the accident made news once again, when French authorities accused a U.S. airline of playing a key role and charged it with manslaughter.  It was a highly unusual decision. And fiercely debated. Even today there are disagreements over what brought that plane down. Tonight we'll explore the theories about what really happened to Flight 4590.  And try to answer this question - until we know why 113 people died that day, will we be safe in the skies?

On that July day, the Concorde was full of German tourists on their way to New York.  The flight was delayed a couple of hours. When takeoff did begin -- at 4:42 in the afternoon -- other planes were asked to wait -- as they often were when the Concorde made a move. One of the planes on hold that day was a 747 -- with French President Jacques Chirac on board. At first, as the plane shot down the runway, all seemed normal -- but not for long.

Eyewitness: "I couldn't see anything, in fact - could only see a ball of fire."

Office workers near Charles de Gaulle airport, north of Paris, looked out their window -- as they did every day when the Concorde took off. The burning plane -- trailing flames -- lifted into the air. It missed the 747, with the French president on board by only thirty feet, its pilot would later say. The office workers watching nearby knew immediately that something was terribly wrong.

Drivers on nearby roads were watching --transfixed -- as the plane -- flying low and slow -- struggled to stay aloft. It tried to get up a little bit higher. And it started turning. And then suddenly -- the giant plane plunged to the ground.

Video   Celebrities describe 'magnificent machine' Musician Sting, model Christie Brinkley and other recall their rides aboard the Concorde. Dateline NBC

The Concorde had slammed into the Hotelissimo Hotel in the Paris suburb of Gonesse.

Alice Brooking: And my first reaction was that there'd been an earthquake.

Alice Brooking, a 21-year-old British student, was in her room in the hotel when the Concorde hit.

Alice Brooking: The walls were shaking, and the paintings were coming off the walls. They were falling to the ground.

She quickly realized there was only one way out of her second floor room alive -- through the window. She jumped -- and ran.

Alice Brooking: It was a scene from hell. It was absolute pandemonium. So people were literally all around me shaking.

Most of the passengers who died that day -- the German tourists -- were on a charter flight to New York. Once there, they were due to board a cruise ship. There was one American on the plane. And nine French crew members.

President Clinton: I wanted to extend the deepest condolences of the American people to the families of those who were lost.

Four more people died on the ground. Eyewitnesses who saw the blazing crash site through heat and haze were profoundly shaken. Few realized it then, but the crash was the beginning of the end for the world's first supersonic passenger plane.

French aviation investigators had a deadly mystery to solve. What could have happened? How could a supersonic plane without a crash to its name, with a highly skilled crew, on a clear afternoon -- suddenly smash into the ground less than two minutes after take-off?

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