Some accidents take on symbolic proportions. Princess Diana’s fatal car crash in Paris in 1997 springs to mind—people may not recall the exact date but many around the world remember exactly where they were when they heard the news.
The Concorde’s first and only deadly crash is another such accident.
On July 25, 2000, Air France Flight 4590 took to the runway at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle Airport, bound for New York. It was a sunny summer day, perfect flying weather. Yet the aircraft caught fire and crashed less than two minutes after takeoff, destroying a hotel near the airport. All 100 passengers and nine Air France crew members died, along with four people at the hotel.
That accident was the beginning of the end for the Concorde, an ambitious joint British and French program for supersonic flight. After nearly 30 years of service, the historic “white bird,” as the French call it, retired for good in November 2003.
The former Air France steward Philippe Levasseur was in the lobby of the Mayflower Hotel in Manhattan when he learned the news. He was sitting on a bench, taking off his skates after roller-blading in Central Park. At first, he thought the receptionist was frowning at his skates. Moving closer to the reception desk in socks, he realized she was crying.
“There’s been a plane crash!” she said.
“Air France?” he asked.
“Your plane! The Concorde!”
Levasseur, who had planned to leave shortly for J.F.K. Airport to welcome that flight’s arriving passengers, stared at her in disbelief. Unable to speak, he thought, “It couldn’t be. Not the Concorde!”
He and the receptionist wept as they reviewed the hotel’s reservation logs, noting the names of the Air France personnel who would have been on this flight.
Another flight attendant, named Geraldine,* stepped out of the elevator, her eyes red and her usual smiling face taut. “It’s all over CNN,” she said.
Levasseur joined Geraldine in watching the news flashes and learned the extent of the disaster: the flames and billowing smoke, the aircraft wreckage, the hotel reduced to charred rubble. Other crew members rushed to the Mayflower after seeing scenes on television screens in shop windows.
Meanwhile, back in France, Levasseur’s family fielded more than 190 phone calls from friends, relatives, and co-workers, checking to see if he was O.K.
He was, but the fact that the flight never arrived in New York has haunted Levasseur for 25 years. His own last Concorde flight—and 171st in three years of onboard service—was just one week before the crash. Five of the crew members working with him on that July 18 flight were among the victims one week later.
Before the Fall
The Concorde crews were particularly close-knit. While airline pilots are usually an elite caste, everyone involved in the supersonic program was elite. Of its 15,000 cabin crew members, Air France selected just 100 to serve aboard the Concorde. Their uniforms were designed by haute couturiers like Jean Patou and Nina Ricci. And only 12 pilots, mechanics, and other technical crew members at a time were chosen to work on the Concorde.
“I joined Air France as a pilot in 1971 and was only selected to fly the Concorde in 1984,” Pierre Grange, who is now retired, says. “You had to prove yourself to join that club.” He was a Concorde pilot until 1989. Following the accident, changes were made to the Concorde, including the tires and location of the fuel tank. In 2001, he flew that modified aircraft as a test pilot.
“When I joined the ranks of Concorde pilots, I thought they would be quite an arrogant group,” Grange says. “Instead … the usual hierarchy dissolved since we flew regularly with the same cabin and technical crews. We would all get together upon arrival. I always said that, on the Concorde, I’m traveling with friends.”
Grange is now president of the Concorde and Supersonic Professionals Association, which is devoted to sharing the stories of those who created and operated the aircraft. Each year, the association organizes a commemoration to honor the passengers and crew members who perished in the accident, as well as the Concorde program itself. More than 150 people participated in the 25th-anniversary edition last summer.
On July 25, 2000, Air France Flight 4590 was chartered for a group consisting primarily of German tourists. Maria Amaral, a sales agent for special Concorde flights who worked out of Charles de Gaulle Airport, remembers wishing the passengers, “Bon voyage—have a good trip.”
“A couple leaving for their honeymoon wanted to say something nice in French,” she says. “They said ‘Adieu!’ as they left the lounge. I smiled and said, ‘No, no. It’s au revoir because adieu is too final.’”
Amaral also remembers seeing, in the bus shuttling passengers to the tarmac, a young boy with a huge smile and a cap over his eyes: “He was so happy to be traveling with his father. I leaned over to look for his eyes under the cap and told him, ‘How lucky you are to be on this marvelous trip aboard this extraordinary plane!’”
The technical controller Jean-Louis Allegre was bantering with cabin crew members in the galley minutes prior to closing the Concorde door. “Brigitte said she was looking forward to retiring in 20 months and to going back to her favorite places without having to rush through them.”
“Virginie was excited about traveling around the world for the first time, with the planned launch of Air France’s Concorde world-tour offering a few weeks later,” says Allegre. “Both stewardesses were busy in the galley when my job was done, so I just said a quick good-bye.”
“Are you on duty tomorrow?” one of them asked.
“Yes, I’ll be here to greet you.”
“See you tomorrow then.”
“‘See you tomorrow. Have a good flight.’ I got off the plane and closed the door.”
Happier are the crew’s reminiscences of the people who traveled aboard the Concorde.
According to one story, when Paul McCartney asked to visit the cockpit, his eyes lit up like a child’s at all of the lights and controls inside.
Cathy Balenovic, who oversaw V.I.P. relations at J.F.K. for the Concorde, says she can barely remember the list of stars who came on board because there were so many, from Jackie Onassis, Henry Kissinger, and Prince Albert of Monaco to Madonna, Sting, and Meryl Streep.
Once, Balenovic had coffee with Robert Redford after he missed his flight to Paris. “The rule was the Concorde waits for no one,” she explains. “He was very courteous and understanding.”
Another time, she saw Prince dance around one of the young female agents at the boarding gate. “It was spectacular!”
There was also the time Michael Jackson booked the last four rows—16 seats in all—for his entourage. “I didn’t recognize him at first,” Levasseur says. “He wasn’t on the official passenger list, and he was wearing a hat and Sgt. Pepper–style jacket.”
When the singer’s bodyguard asked Levasseur to request an autograph from actor Steven Seagal, who was seated in the front row, the steward proceeded with caution.
“Our role was to serve,” he says. “We were trained to be diplomatic and to manage delicate situations.”
“It turned out that Mr. Seagal and Mr. Jackson were friends, and Mr. Seagal joined the group in the back.” The bodyguard got more than an autograph.
The Cost of Speed
Having ridden aboard the Concorde once myself—as an unpaid intern on an errand for Newsweek’s Paris bureau in 1983—I can attest to the fascination exerted by supersonic travel. My mission was to get photos of Pope John Paul II in Poland to the magazine’s New York headquarters in time to meet a tight deadline. (My return mission, on a regular Air France flight, was to bring back an entire Carnegie Deli cheesecake for the Newsweek Paris team.)
Imagine traveling from Paris to New York in three and a half hours—the six-hour time difference meant that you actually arrived earlier in the morning in New York than when you left Paris. The trip was so quick there wasn’t enough time to watch a movie, so catering was the main entertainment. French Concorde menus in the year 2000 featured caviar, lobster, and foie gras, all washed down with Dom Pérignon—and that was just the starter. On my flight, the crew offered us aperitifs before serving the meal on French porcelain. They followed up with coffee, tea, and chocolates.
My meal was interrupted by the pilot announcing that we had reached Mach 1 (roughly 740 m.p.h.) and then, minutes later, doubled that to Mach 2. Each milestone triggered an eruption of applause from the passengers. The crew pointed to the Mach meter near the cockpit door and handed out souvenir postcards marked, “I broke the sound barrier.”
If the supersonic speed shook windows down on the ground, those of us in the air didn’t notice it. I’ve rarely experienced such a smooth ride in an airplane. As was the custom before air travel became commonplace, every passenger applauded again upon landing.
While Concorde flights were mostly smooth sailing for passengers, they were tough on the cabin crew. Levasseur notes the speed, heat, noise, and air pressure took such a physical toll that Air France crews were limited to six Concorde round-trip flights per month for up to six months. (When they weren’t working aboard the Concorde, those crews worked on regular long-haul flights.)
In the wake of the crash, the relentless question of what had caused it also took a toll, this one more psychological in nature. Was it due to human error? A mechanical failure? Sabotage?
After multiple investigations, French courts in 2010 and 2012 ruled that the culprit was a strip of titanium released by a Continental Airlines DC-10 plane, which minutes earlier had used the same runway as the Concorde. The strip reportedly punctured a tire, scattering debris into the left wing and rupturing the fuel tank.
After the crash, the Concorde was reconfigured, but the damage was already done. The image of that one fatal accident had eroded trust in supersonic travel. And even business passengers had trouble justifying the cost of a Concorde ticket in the tough economic times that followed the September 11 attacks. The financial and environmental costs of Concorde’s huge need for fuel, as well as the noise pollution provoked by its sonic boom, were also issues.
Back to the Future
Despite the challenges, the era of commercial supersonic travel may be coming back.
New Zealand’s Dawn Aerospace tested a rocket-powered aircraft last November, marking the first time a civil aircraft has flown supersonic since the Concorde.
A project is reportedly underway in China, and, in the United States, two civil projects are currently in development: NASA’s, in partnership with Lockheed Martin, for the QueSST (Quiet Supersonic Technology) X-59 aircraft, and Boom Technology’s Overture airliner. The latter aims to muffle the sonic boom on the ground by traveling at a specific height and angle. Boom claims to have 130 orders or pre-orders for Overture, from American, United, and Japan Airlines, among others.
To help those U.S. projects create a domestic market for supersonic travel, this year the Federal Aviation Administration was tasked with revising the air-speed limit over land. Since the 1970s, that limit had restricted most Concorde flights to the East Coast destinations of New York and Washington, D.C.
The European Union has funded several projects studying noise reduction and the environmental impacts of supersonic flights but is not planning to develop any commercial aircraft.
Meanwhile, one abandoned Concorde sits at the edge of Charles de Gaulle Airport, visible from the highway leading to and from Paris. The last one to land at London’s Heathrow Airport, in 2003, is still on display there. Others are in hangars in air-and-space museums, including the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., and Le Bourget near Paris. They also travel occasionally—rigged to trailers—for air shows and exhibitions. They’re worth a visit while we wait to see what comes next.
Lorie Teeter Lichtlen is a Paris-based writer
