Concorde crashes near Paris

A supersonic Concorde airliner crashed after take-off from Paris Charles de Gaulle airport on its way to New York yesterday, Air France said, and witnesses said it had ploughed into a hotel near the French capital.

A fire service spokesman said about 100 passengers were on board the airliner, while the French Interior Ministry said that 109 people are believed dead. Radio and television reports said the plane had hit a hotel in the town of Gonesse, a few kilometres (miles) southwest of the airport.

There were no immediate reports of the number of dead or injured but a witness in Gonesse told LCI radio he doubted whether anyone on the ground had survived. “There is one part of the hotel that wasn’t touched and the annex of the hotel is completely in flames,” the witness said.

The aircraft went down with an explosion “like a mini-atomic bomb,” according to a witness. Sid Hare, himself a pilot, told CNN news the engines of the supersonic jet were racing two or three times louder than normal and that smoke was trailing from the back. It was a huge fireball, like a mini-atomic bomb – really a sickening sight,” said Hare. “One of the plane’s four engines obviously had had a catastrophic failure. It was trailing in flames 200 or 300 feet behind the plane.” Hare said the plane had probably suffered an engine failure within a few seconds after take-off. “My thought is that one engine failed on take-off and damaged the one next to it…that would account for the huge flames,” he said.

The Air France airliner was bound for John F. Kennedy airport outside New York. A witness driving past Charles de Gaulle airport at the time the plane took off told Radio France Info that one of the engines appeared to be on fire. Air France and British Airways both said on Monday that they had detected microscopic cracks in the wings of Concorde aircraft but Air France said there was no danger to passengers. Concorde, an Anglo-French project, entered service in the mid-1970s and is the world’s only supersonic passenger aircraft. A total of 13 are in service, seven with British Airways and six with Air France. Reuters