Air France was flying one of their Concorde’s to JFK in New York, the plane crashed a few minutes before 3pm GMT. The Concorde struck a piece of debris that came off a Continental DC10 four minutes earlier. The debris had punctured the Concorde’s tyre in which it quickly disintegrated due to the intense speed, a piece of the tyre flung up and broke an electrical cable, the impact resulting in the tank fracturing and began to leak badly. The fuel later caught fire. The Pilots tried to retract the landing gear, in which it did not do so. Without a retracting landing gear, an aircraft will have a lot of stress on climbing and more power is required, this was not available to the Concorde due to the pilots responding to a fire warning on engine 2.
As the Concorde climbed with a trail of black smoke and flames it began to pitch up like a rocket on a launch pad, but instead of ascending in began to plummet to the floor rapidly. It fell directly into a hotel 2 minutes after takeoff, 113 died, 109 on the airplane, 4 on the ground. Most of the passengers were German; all of the crew were French.
The Concorde was thought to be one of the safest airplanes at the time, the flight was for passengers on a Cruise Ship leaving New York for Ecudor, sadly no one made it. The Concorde to this day is not in service.
