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 that 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.

Aircraft and crew

The aircraft involved was a 25-year-old Aérospatiale-BAC Concorde (registration F-BTSC). It was powered by four Rolls-Royce Olympus 593/610 turbojet engines, each of which was equipped with reheat. The aircraft's last scheduled repair had taken place on 21 July 2000, four days before the accident; no problems were reported during the repair. At the time of the crash, the aircraft had flown for 11,989 hours and had made 4,873 take-off and landing cycles.

Cabin Services Director:

Virginie Le Gouadec (36), had 14 years with Air France, including 1.5 years on Concorde.

Flight Attendants:

Brigitte Kruse (49), had 22 years with Air France, including 10 years on Concorde.
Anne Porcheron (36), had 9 years with Air France, including 1 year on Concorde.
Patrick Chevalier (38), had 10 years with Air France, including 3 years on Concorde.
Hervé Garcia (32), had 7 years with Air France, including 1 year on Concorde.
Florence Eyquem-Fournel (27), had 4 years with Air France, including 1 year on Concorde.

Accident

The wind at the airport was light and variable that day, and was reported to the cockpit crew as an tailwind as they lined up on runway 26R. 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 () into the underside of the left wing at an estimated speed of .

Air traffic controller Gilles Logelin noticed the flames before the Concorde was airborne and informed the flight crew. 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):

Fatalities

The flight was chartered by German company Peter Deilmann Cruises. The passengers were on their way to board the cruise ship MS Deutschland in New York for a 16-day cruise to Manta, Ecuador. They included German football manager Rudi Faßnacht and German trade union board member Christian Götz.

All the passengers and crew, as well as four employees of the Hotelissimo hotel, were killed in the crash. British Airways grounded their Concordes three weeks later for the same reason.

Air France's Concorde operation had been a money-losing venture, and it is claimed that the aeroplane had been kept in service as a matter of national pride; British Airways claimed to make a profit on its Concorde operations. According to Jock Lowe, a Concorde pilot, until the crash of Air France Flight 4590 at Paris, the British Airways Concorde operation made a net average profit of about £30M (equivalent to £M in ) a year. Commercial service was resumed on 7 November 2001, after a £17M (£M in ) safety improvement programme, until the type was retired between May (Air France) and October (British Airways), 2003.

Investigation

The official investigation was conducted by France's accident investigation bureau, the Bureau of Enquiry and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety (BEA) and led by chief investigator Alain Bouillard.

Post-accident investigation revealed that the aircraft was over the maximum takeoff weight for ambient temperature and other conditions, and over the maximum structural weight, loaded so that the centre of gravity was aft of the take-off limit. A spacer normally keeps the left main landing gear in alignment, but it had not been replaced after recent maintenance; the BEA concluded that this did not contribute to the accident.

The final report was issued on 2002.

Conclusions

The BEA concluded that:

The aircraft was overloaded by above the maximum safe takeoff weight. Any effect on takeoff performance from this excess weight was negligible. This wear strip had been replaced at Tel Aviv, Israel, during a C check on 11 June 2000, and then again at Houston, Texas, on 9 July 2000. The strip installed in Houston had been neither manufactured nor installed in accordance with the procedures as defined by the manufacturer.

While examining the wreckage in a warehouse, investigators noticed that a spacer was missing from the bogie beam on the left-hand main landing gear. (It was later found in an Air France maintenance workshop.) The additional weight of the extra fuel in tank 11, the rearmost tank, plus the additional luggage shifted the aircraft's centre of gravity rearwards, to beyond the safe operating limit of 54 percent, set by the Concorde test pilots. Once the damaged forward tank 5 began to lose fuel, the centre of gravity moved even further rearward.

At one point, it drifted toward a just-landed Air France Boeing 747 that was carrying then-French President Jacques Chirac (who was returning from the 26th G8 summit meeting in Okinawa, Japan). As the plane was about to leave the runway, with the aircraft rotated for takeoff, its speed was only 188 knots, 11 knots under the minimum recommended velocity. The flight engineer shut down engine number two at only 25 feet altitude. The procedure for shutting down an engine is to wait until stable flight at 400 feet is achieved, and then only on the command of the captain.

According to Mike Bannister, former British Airways Concorde Chief Pilot, there is evidence to suggest that the fuel tank transfer pump that fed the ruptured fuel tank, was left running, causing fuel to be pumped overboard and subsequently feeding the fire, and that the fuel tank was approximately 30% full at the time of crash rather than empty, if the pump had been off.

Previous tyre incidents

In November 1981, the American National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) sent a letter of concern to the French BEA that included safety recommendations for Concorde. This communiqué was the result of the NTSB's investigations of four Air France Concorde incidents during a 20-month period from to . The NTSB described those incidents as "potentially catastrophic", because they were caused by blown tyres during takeoff. During its 27 years in service, Concorde had about 70 tyre- or wheel-related incidents, seven of which caused serious damage to the aircraft or were potentially catastrophic.

13 June 1979: The number 5 and 6 tyres blew out during a takeoff from Washington Dulles International Airport. Fragments thrown from the tyres and rims damaged number 2 engine, punctured three fuel tanks, severed several hydraulic lines and electrical wires, and tore a large hole on the top of the wing over the wheel well area.
21 July 1979: Another blown tyre incident during takeoff from Dulles Airport. After that second incident the "French director general of civil aviation issued an Airworthiness Directive and Air France issued a Technical Information Update, each calling for revised procedures. These included required inspection of each wheel and tyre for condition, pressure, and temperature prior to each takeoff. In addition, crews were advised that landing gear should not be raised when a wheel/tyre problem is suspected."
August 1981: British Airways (BA) plane taking off from New York suffered a blow-out, damaging landing gear door, engine, and fuel tank.
October 1993: Tyre burst on a BA plane during taxi at Heathrow, puncturing wing, damaging fuel tanks, and causing a major fuel leak.

Because it is a tailless delta-wing aircraft, Concorde could not use the normal flaps or slats to assist takeoff and landing, and required a significantly higher air and tyre speed during the takeoff roll than an average airliner. That higher speed increased the risk of tyre burst during takeoff. Analysis of test results revealed that this occurring could release sufficient kinetic energy to cause the fuel tank to rupture. The analysis of impact energy considered a tyre piece of with a speed around . The piece could reach this speed by combination of rotation of the tyre on takeoff and the tyre burst.

The crash of the Air France Concorde nonetheless proved to be the beginning of the end for the type. Just before service resumed, the September 11 attacks took place, resulting in a marked drop in passenger numbers, and contributing to the eventual end of Concorde flights. Air France stopped flights in , followed by British Airways five months later.

In June 2010, two groups attempted, unsuccessfully, to revive Concorde for "Heritage" flights in time for the 2012 Summer Olympics. The British Save Concorde Group, SCG, and French group Olympus 593 were attempting to obtain four Rolls-Royce Olympus engines from the Le Bourget Air and Space Museum.

Criminal investigation

In March 2005, French authorities began a criminal investigation of Continental Airlines, whose plane dropped the debris on the runway, and in September of the same year, Henri Perrier, the former chief engineer of the Concorde division at Aérospatiale at the time of the first test flight in 1969 and the programme director in the 1980s and early 1990s, was placed under formal investigation.

In March 2008, Bernard Farret, a deputy prosecutor in Pontoise, outside Paris, asked judges to bring manslaughter charges against Continental Airlines and two of its employees – John Taylor, the mechanic who replaced the wear strip on the DC-10, and his manager Stanley Ford – alleging negligence in the way the repair was carried out. and claimed in court that it was being used as a scapegoat by the BEA. The airline suggested that the Concorde "was already on fire when its wheels hit the titanium strip, and that around 20 first-hand witnesses had confirmed that the plane seemed to be on fire immediately after it began its take-off roll".

At the same time, charges were laid against Henri Perrier, head of the Concorde program at Aérospatiale; Jacques Hérubel, Concorde's chief engineer; and Claude Frantzen, head of DGAC, the French airline regulator. It was alleged that Perrier, Hérubel, and Frantzen knew that the plane's fuel tanks could be susceptible to damage from foreign objects, but nonetheless allowed it to fly.

The trial ran in a Parisian court from February to December 2010. Continental Airlines was found criminally responsible for the disaster. It was fined €200,000 ($271,628) and ordered to pay Air France . Taylor was given a 15-month suspended sentence, while Ford, Perrier, Hérubel, and Frantzen were cleared of all charges. The court ruled that the crash resulted from a piece of metal from a Continental jet that was left on the runway; the object punctured a tyre on the Concorde and then ruptured a fuel tank. The convictions were overturned by a French appeals court in November 2012, thereby clearing Continental (which had merged with United Airlines by then) and Taylor of criminal responsibility.

The Parisian court also ruled that Continental would have to pay 70% of any compensation claims. As Air France had paid out to the families of the victims, Continental could be made to pay its share of that compensation payout. The French appeals court, while overturning the criminal rulings by the Parisian court, affirmed the civil ruling and left Continental liable for the compensation claims.

Legacy

thumb|upright|Gonesse memorial

A monument in honour of the crash victims was established at Gonesse. The Gonesse monument consists of a piece of transparent glass with a piece of an aircraft wing jutting through. Another monument, a memorial surrounded with topiary planted in the shape of a Concorde, was established in 2006 at Mitry-Mory, just south of Charles de Gaulle Airport.

Documentaries and other media

The Concorde that crashed was the primary aircraft extensively used in The Concorde ... Airport '79.
The timeline and causes of the crash were profiled in the premiere episode of the National Geographic documentary series Seconds From Disaster.
NBC aired a Dateline NBC documentary on the crash, its causes, and its legacy on 2009.
The Smithsonian Channel aired a 90-minute documentary in 2010.'
The accident and subsequent investigation were featured in the 7th episode during Season 14 of the Canadian documentary series Mayday (also known as Air Crash Investigation) titled "Concorde: Up in Flames", first broadcast in January 2015.
In 2020, Montreal synth-pop group Le Couleur released an album, Concorde, inspired by the story of this crash.
In the song "Concorde" from the rock band Black Country, New Road the lyrics subtly mention the crash as that is what the word "Concorde" is most known for in media.
The accident was featured in an episode of Black Box Down.

References

BEA

External links

Bureau of Enquiry and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety
"Accident on 25 July 2000 at "La Patte d'oie" at Gonesse ." (Alternate ) (Archive)
Preliminary report published 1 September 2000
Interim report published 15 December 2000
Interim report 2 published 23 July 2001
Final report (Archive) (PDF, Archive) published 16 January 2002
"Accident survenu le 25 juillet 2000 au lieu-dit "La Patte d'oie" à Gonesse ." (Alternate ) (Archive) – the French version is the report of record.
Preliminary report (PDF, Archive), published 1 September 2000.
Interim report (PDF, Archive), published 15 December 2000.
Interim report 2 (PDF, Archive), published 23 July 2001.
Final report (PDF, Archive), published 16 January 2002
PlaneCrashInfo.Com – Data Entry on Flight 4590
Doomed – The Real Story of Flight 4590: Special Investigation, The Guardian, 13 May 2001. – mentions other contributing factors
Disaster, CBS News
CVR transcript
All 109 Aboard Dead in Concorde Crash into Hotel Near Paris; 4 On Ground Dead – CNN