Air France Flight 4590

Air France Flight 4590 was an international charter flight from Paris to New York. On 25 July 2000, a Concorde passenger jet operating the flight crashed shortly after takeoff, killing all 109 people on board and 4 on the ground. It was the only fatal Concorde accident during its 27-year operational history.

Whilst taking off from Charles de Gaulle Airport, Air France Flight 4590 ran over debris on the runway dropped by an aircraft during the preceding departure, causing a tyre to explode and disintegrate. Tyre fragments, launched upwards at great speed by the rapidly spinning wheel, violently struck the underside of the wing, damaging parts of the landing gear – thus preventing its retraction – and causing the integral fuel tank to rupture. Large amounts of fuel leaking from the rupture ignited, causing a loss of thrust in the left side engines 1 and 2. The aircraft lifted off, but the loss of thrust, high drag from the extended landing gear, and fire damage to the flight controls made it impossible to maintain control. The jet crashed into a hotel in nearby Gonesse two minutes after takeoff. All nine crew and one hundred passengers on board were killed, as well as four people in the hotel. Four other people sustained slight injuries.

In the wake of the disaster, the entire Concorde fleet was grounded. Following the implementation of various modifications to the airframe, it returned to service on 7 November 2001. However, due to limited commercial success, especially in the wake of the September 11 attacks, Concorde aircraft were retired by Air France in May 2003 and by British Airways that November.

Accident

The wind at the airport was light and variable that day, and was reported to the cockpit crew as an 8 knot tailwind as they lined up on runway 26R.

At 16:38 CEST (14:38 UTC), five minutes before the Concorde departed, Continental Airlines Flight 55, a McDonnell Douglas DC-10 (registration N13067), took off from the same runway for Newark International Airport and lost a titanium alloy wear strip that was part of the engine cowl, about 435 mm long, 29 to 34 mm wide, and 1.4 mm thick. The DC-10 was not seriously affected by this. At 16:42, the Concorde ran over this piece of debris during its take-off run while the aircraft was at a speed of 185 mph (300 km/h), cutting the right-front tyre (tyre No 2) of its left main wheel bogie and sending a large chunk of tyre debris (4.5 kg) into the underside of the left wing at an estimated speed of 140 m/s. It did not directly puncture any of the fuel tanks, but it sent out a pressure shockwave that ruptured the number 5 fuel tank at its weakest point, just ahead of the left landing gear well. Leaking fuel gushing out from the bottom of the wing was most likely ignited either by an electric arc in the landing gear bay (debris cutting the landing gear wire) or through contact with hot parts of the engine. Engines 1 and 2 both surged and lost all power, likely due to ingestion of hot gases (both engines) and tyre debris (engine 1 only), and then engine 1 slowly recovered over the next few seconds. A large plume of flame developed, and the flight engineer shut down engine 2 in response to a fire warning and the captain's command.

Air traffic controller Gilles Logelin noticed the flames before the Concorde was airborne and informed the flight crew. However, the aircraft had passed V1 speed, at which point takeoff is considered unsafe to abort. The plane did not gain enough airspeed with the three remaining engines as damage to the landing gear bay door prevented the retraction of the undercarriage. The aircraft was unable to climb or accelerate, and its speed decayed during the course of its brief flight. The fire damaged the inner elevon of the left wing and it began to disintegrate, melted by the extremely high temperatures. Engine number 1 surged again, but did not fully recover, and the right wing lifted from the asymmetrical thrust, banking the aircraft to over 100 degrees. The crew reduced the power on engines three and four in an attempt to level the aircraft, but they lost control due to deceleration and the aircraft stalled. The aircraft struck the ground left wing low after a heading change of nearly 180°, crashing into the Hôtelissimo Les Relais Bleus Hotel. A video of the burning plane on takeoff and the aftermath of the crash was captured by a passenger in a passing truck.

The crew tried to divert to nearby Paris–Le Bourget Airport, but accident investigators stated that a safe landing would have been highly unlikely, given the aircraft's flightpath. The cockpit voice recorder (CVR) recorded the last intelligible words in the cockpit (translated into English):