Air Crash Investigation Air France Flight 4590 Concorde Disaster Paris

Video from the channel Flight-X about Concorde, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 53:01. Language: English. Video type: Documentary.

A documentary from the air-crash investigation series devoted to Air France Flight AF 4590, the Concorde that crashed shortly after taking off from Paris-Charles de Gaulle on 25 July 2000. It combines testimony from witnesses, the air traffic controller on duty, Concorde pilot John Hutchinson, an air safety expert and relatives of the victims with computer recreations based on the official report of the French accident investigation bureau.

The flight was chartered for a group of German tourists who were flying to New York to connect with a Caribbean cruise. In command was Captain Christian Marty, 54, known in France for having crossed the Atlantic on a windsurfing board in 1982. A last-minute repair to engine number 2 delayed departure by an hour. Until then the Concorde, which linked North America with London or Paris in about three and three-quarter hours at over 2,200 km/h, had not suffered a single fatal accident in 25 years of service.

The documentary reconstructs the investigation. A bomb attack was first ruled out, because the black boxes recorded no explosion, and then a thrust reverser failure. The key clue was a 43 cm metal strip found on the runway, which had come off the engine mount of a Continental Airlines DC-10 that had taken off five minutes earlier. The documentary also recalls the 1979 incident at Washington-Dulles, when a tyre burst damaged the wing of another Air France Concorde.

At around 323 km/h, a tyre ran over the strip and burst. A 4.5 kg fragment struck the wing and the pressure wave ruptured the fuel tank, from which about 75 litres a second were escaping. Cables severed in the landing gear well ignited the fuel, the gear could not be retracted and engines 1 and 2 lost power. Without enough runway left to brake, the crew took off and tried to reach Le Bourget, but the fire destroyed the wing structure and its controls. The aircraft came down on a hotel in Gonesse: all 109 occupants (100 passengers and nine crew) died, along with four people on the ground.

After the accident the entire fleet was grounded. The tyres were reinforced, the tanks were lined with Kevlar and the landing gear wiring was protected. Commercial flights resumed fourteen months later, but the last passenger flight was on 24 October 2003.