While the flight crew prepared for takeoff, Marty led them through the preflight checklist, which you can hear on the cockpit voice recorder from that day. As a pilot, colleagues regarded Marty as humble, competent, and professional.
He’d once windsurfed solo across the Atlantic Ocean, and he often stowed his mountain bike in the plane’s cargo hold. The pilot of the Concorde that day, Captain Christian Marty, was an adventure seeker in his spare time. But the rivets had come loose, and the glue had failed to hold, and no one had seen it fall onto the runway at de Gaulle. The strip wasn’t a standard part of the DC-10 a mechanic had riveted it on in Houston 16 days earlier, and then affixed it with an additional layer of mastic adhesive. T he immediate cause of the Concorde crash was a thin, 1-inch-wide titanium strip, just 17 inches long, which had fallen off the engine cowling of a departing Continental DC-10 five minutes before Flight 4590 was scheduled to depart. But it would be many years before the aircraft’s first commercial flights began in 1976. Two weeks later, on October 1, the plane would go supersonic for the first time. Is it worth a second chance?Ĭoncorde 001 lands in an arresting fence during a test flight in Toulouse, France, on September 18, 1968. Supersonic commercial travel is seductive, but it is also difficult and costly. Above all, Scholl and his team of engineers must demonstrate that they have eliminated the fatal flaws that contributed to the Concorde’s crash. Boom must not only prove to air carriers that the planes are a sound investment, but also convince the public that supersonic flight is environmentally acceptable. To succeed, Boom must address the engineering challenges that limited the Concorde to the North Atlantic, as well as the commercial challenges that reserved supersonic travel for a narrow elite. company that’s designing a successor aircraft to the Concorde called the Boom Overture. Everything’s changed,” says Blake Scholl, the founder and CEO of Boom Technology, a U.S. “Remember, that airplane was designed 60 years ago, with slide rules and draft paper and wind tunnels-and no computer. Now a new generation of entrepreneurs and engineers is attempting to revive commercial supersonic flight in the wake of the Concorde’s demise. Following the disaster outside Charles de Gaulle, the era of supersonic passenger transit came to an end. The Concorde never attracted commercial competition, and plans for a successor aircraft were abandoned. Once hoping for more than 200 aircraft, the Concorde program, sponsored by the governments of France and the United Kingdom, entered only 14 planes into commercial service, and that handful of planes flew only two regular routes due to the aircraft’s thundering sonic booms and exclusive $12,000 round-trip ticket price. Flight 4590 became the final word in the Concorde’s legacy: one that started with the glimmering luster of a technological marvel but faded from the limitations of suboptimal design features and paralyzing commercial restrictions. Concorde service resumed in 2001, but passenger demand never recovered, and in 2003 the plane was permanently retired. Within a month, the entire Concorde fleet was grounded, and the ensuing investigation would take almost a year and a half to complete. Rescue workers arrived to find the crash site littered with debris, including the Concorde’s signature nose cone, pieces of the wings, the contents of the passengers’ luggage, and a hotel bathtub. The crew valiantly attempted to save it, but after a minute of flight, the raging fire overtook the aircraft, and it crashed into a small hotel six miles from the airport. Transformed into a careening fireball, the Concorde barely managed to get airborne, reaching an altitude of just 200 feet. But midway through the takeoff, in an astonishing scene witnessed by dozens of people, the Concorde caught fire and was soon blasting the tarmac with a plume of flames longer than the airliner itself. The plane’s four Rolls-Royce engines came online with a terrific roar, and the Concorde began to hurtle down the runway. In 24 years of service, the Concorde had never experienced a single fatality. Air France Flight 4590 was scheduled to fly to New York City at speeds of up to 1,350 miles per hour, crossing the Atlantic Ocean in just three and a half hours.
A s the Concorde prepared to take off from Charles de Gaulle Airport outside Paris on the afternoon of July 25, 2000, nothing seemed amiss.
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