113 Die in Fiery Crash of Concorde

Trailing fire and pitching its needle-nose skyward, an Air France Concorde destined for New York crashed shortly after takeoff from Charles de Gaulle Airport on Tuesday, killing all 109 people on board and four more on the ground.

At least a dozen others were injured when the supersonic jet slammed into a small hotel in a rural area four miles west of the main airport serving Paris, sending a plume of smoke 1,000 feet into the air and breaking into fiery mounds of metal.

All but a handful of the passengers on charter Flight 4590 were German tourists on their way to meet a holiday cruise ship. One American--a retired pilot for Air France--two Danes and an Austrian also were on board. The nine-member crew was French.

This was the first crash in the 30-year history of the Concorde, a luxury jet built like a hummingbird to fly at twice the speed of sound and, at least until now, considered one of the safest commercial aircraft.

Only 16 of the supersonic jets were built. The plane that crashed was one of 13 still in service. Air France and British Airways, which operate them, immediately suspended scheduled flights.

The cause of the crash was under investigation, but witnesses said one or both of the plane’s left engines caught fire, and the French aviation authority said an explosion, probably triggered by the fire, occurred shortly before the plane crashed.

French officials said sabotage was not suspected and that anti-terrorism investigators were unlikely to be brought into the inquiry.

The accident came just a day after British Airways announced that it had grounded one of its Concordes following the discovery of hairline cracks in wing components, but there was no indication of such a problem with the fallen aircraft. In fact, an Air France official said the ill-fated plane had been one of two found free of the cracks after inspection Monday.

Witnesses described seeing flames spewing out of the left side of the low-flying plane and a long trail of fire before the aircraft reared and plummeted.

“I watched it turn and twist,” said Christine Turpin, 51, a shaken gas station owner who witnessed the tragedy from her car while driving home.

The plane was over the town of Gonesse, she said. “It turned out over the fields. Obviously, the pilot was trying to keep it from coming down on the houses. Then there was a huge explosion and flames,” she said.

A British businessman who saw the flight take off from another plane waiting on the runway said the Concorde was afire before its wheels even left the ground.

“The left engines were visibly on fire,” Darren Atkins told Britain’s Sky Television after arriving in Zurich. “On the tarmac was some debris that had clearly fallen off the engine, and was in fact still on fire after the aircraft had departed.”

U.S. pilot Sid Hare described the explosion as a “mini-atomic bomb.”

“It was trailing flames 200 to 300 feet behind the plane. It probably wiped out the other engine next to it, so the airplane was then trying to climb on only two out of four engines,” Hare told CNN.

“And it just couldn’t gain altitude. He kept trying to get the nose up to gain altitude, which eventually caused a stall, the nose pitched straight up in the air, and the airplane just started rolling over and back-sliding down toward the ground. It was a sickening sight. When it hit, there was just a huge fireball, like a mini-atomic bomb went up,” he said.

Jean-Philippe Giraud, a 30-year-old truck driver, had been sleeping off the previous night’s long haul in one of the three motels clustered by a V-shaped intersection when the blast blew in the windows.

He ran outside and saw hundreds of yards of cornfields engulfed in flames, along with the Hotelissimo next door.

“You couldn’t even tell it had been an airplane,” Giraud said. “You couldn’t even tell there had been a hotel.”

France’s LCI television today identified those killed on the ground as a British tourist, a French woman and two Poles, Associated Press reported.

Firefighters arrived within minutes and started dousing the crash scene. Steam rose from the smoldering ground, and a pall of damp smoke spread for miles, carrying the smell of burning cornhusks.

When the ground cooled, emergency workers examined the wreckage for the plane’s flight and voice recorders and other clues to the accident, and placed white sheets over whatever remained of the 109 passengers. They marked the human remains with orange traffic cones and eventually the plane’s flight recorder and cockpit voice recorder were recovered.

“It is a tragic and extremely serious accident,” said French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin. “My thoughts are with all of the victims, the crew and our German friends, too. . . . It is an overwhelming scene.”

The crash plunged Germany into mourning, casting a pall over the busiest travel season of the year. Even Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who had just concluded his annual pre-vacation press conference when word of the Concorde tragedy reached Berlin, called off his last meetings as well as his trip.

Schroeder and the entire German Cabinet planned to attend a special memorial for the victims this morning at the Expo 2000 fairgrounds in the chancellor’s home city of Hanover.

Like most Concorde passengers, the majority of the crash victims were elite travelers, in this case headed for a 15-day cruise that cost as much as $11,000.

The Concorde passengers were to be taken upon landing at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York to the ocean liner Deutschland, made famous by the long-running German television serial “Das Traum Schiff” (The Dream Ship), whose biweekly episodes evoke memories of its Hollywood forerunner and likely inspiration, “The Love Boat.”

The cruise organizer, Peter Deilmann Reederei of the northern German town of Neustadt, had already flown more than 400 passengers to New York for today’s scheduled sailing that was to take the Deutschland and 510 passengers to Virginia, Florida, the Bahamas, Cuba, Mexico, and the Panama Canal en route to its destination, Manta, Ecuador.

People arriving by tour bus or by car for the cruise in New York were driven onto the dock to avoid reporters. Some of them gathered on the deck of the red and white cruise ship and stared at a cluster of television crews filming the ship.

Ingrid Woolley, a tour guide hired to take the passengers sightseeing in New York before the ship’s departure, said the group she picked up at the airport did not know of the crash. “I do believe it will affect them,” she said. “I don’t know the reaction because we were told not to advise them.”

Peter Deilmann, owner of the cruise line that deploys eight river-going vessels along the Rhine, Elbe and Danube rivers as well as three ocean liners, said the ship would still sail.

Deilmann complained to German television four hours after the crash that he had yet to receive a complete check-in list from the airline.

“We, as the organizers, cannot begin to notify the families of the victims without this confirmed information,” he told reporters.

The German Foreign Ministry in Berlin said it would release the list of victims no sooner than today. In the meantime, it set up crisis centers at its office in the German capital and at the German Embassy in Paris.

Germany’s vacation season began last week, when schools and universities shut down for a six-week break, jamming highways and filling aircraft and trains in all directions.

But only a lucky few travel by Concorde.

The Concorde, developed jointly by Britain and France, has been a symbol of European technical prowess. It flies at supersonic speed, more than 1,300 mph, at 60,000 feet--nearly twice the altitude of other passenger jets. It crosses the Atlantic in 3 1/2 hours, a flight that generally costs about $10,000 on the London-New York run. A Paris-New York flight costs about $9,000--25% more than first-class passage on other aircraft.

The ill-fated Concorde had been built in 1979 and entered service for Air France in October 1980. It had logged 3,978 landings and 11,989 flying hours, and underwent a complete overhaul 10 months ago.

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Times staff writer John J. Goldman in New York contributed to this report.

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Triumph of ‘60s Technology

The Concorde was developed in the 1960s, built to fly at twice the speed of sound. It proved highly uneconomical, but the plane had an unblemished safety record until now. Concordes take off at subsonic speeds and do not break the speed of sound until they are over the ocean. Because of their unique design, they do take off faster and more steeply than other jets.

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Sources: Center for Aerospace Safety Education at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Reuters, Associated Press, Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft, NOVA, Modern Commercial Aircraft

* RELATED COVERAGE: A7-9