Week of August 10, 2015 – The Concorde Plane Disaster
I can remember a few times in my life when I was at JFK and getting ready to taxi to/from my gate
when the pilot would call everyone’s attention to look out the window to catch a glimpse of the
famous Concorde plane parked at a gate. For years, since its maiden voyage in January 1976 (there
were actually two simultaneous Concorde flights: one taking off from London and the other from
Paris), the Concorde was the pinnacle of commercial air travel. With a takeoff speed of 250 mph
and a cruising speed of 1350 mph (more than twice the speed of sound) a typical London to New
York crossing would take a little less than three and a half hours as opposed to about eight hours for
a subsonic flight.
It happened 15 years ago (July, 2000) when Air France flight 4590, a charter destined for New
York’s JFK from Paris hit disaster. As it neared takeoff speed, the Concorde struck a thin metal
strip on the runway, causing one of its tires to burst. The strip had fallen from the underside of a
Continental Airlines DC-10 that had departed minutes earlier, bound for Houston. Chunks of the
burst tire impacting the Concorde’s wing at tremendous velocity, resulting in a powerful shock
wave within the wing’s fuel tank that ultimately punctured it. Gases from the engines then ignited
leaking fuel, touching off a huge fire. The crew wrestled the crippled jet into the air, but lost control
moments later, slamming into a hotel. All 109 passengers and crew perished, as did four people on
the ground.
For years it was thought that this metal strip on the runway was the direct cause of the crash. But
after years of investigation, this initial cause-effect action has been refuted. There’s no denying the
Concorde jet ran over a piece of metal that caused a tire explosion and a resultant fire. But while the
fire was visually dramatic (caught on camera), and trailed behind the plane in a hellish rooster tail, it
is now believed that even though this caused severe damage to the number 2 engine, such damage
was very much survivable, and would have most likely burned itself out in a matter of a few
minutes. Not only was it survivable, but it was probably avoidable as well, had it not been for a
chain of errors and oversights.
The plane went down not because of any fire, directly, but because of three combined factors: 1);
the plane was traveling too slowly, 2); the plane was several tons overweight and beyond its aft
center of gravity limit, and 3); two of its four engines were damaged or erroneously shut down.
The first factor; the plane was flying too slowly: As it turns out the Concorde’s pilot had pulled the
jet into the air to avoid skidding sideways off the runway and colliding with another plane; a nearby
747. It had veered to the left, with a jammed wheel, because the Concorde’s undercarriage had
locked askew. When the pilot pulled back on the control column to raise the nose and take to the air
(a process that pilots call “rotation”), the plane’s airspeed was only 188 knots, 11 knots below the
minimum recommended velocity required for this maneuver. But the pilot had no choice: the plane
was about to leave the tarmac altogether and plough into the soft and bumpy grass at its side. That
might have ripped off the landing gear, leaving Concorde to overturn and blow up on its own. If not,
the 747 lay straight ahead (it was inside this 747 where the video of the Concorde fire was
