CONCORDE CRASH

	July 25, 2000
	The crash of a Concorde jet outside Paris that killed 113 people. Our report is from Julian Rush of Independent Television News.

JULIAN RUSH: Concorde Flight AF-4590 had been chartered by the German tour operator Deilmann. All the passengers and the nine French crew are dead. Killed too: Four people on the ground as the plane smashed into a field close to the Hotel Relais Bleu in the small town of Gonesse. Laden with tons of fuel for takeoff, the smoke and flames could be seen for miles. It took firefighters an hour and a half to douse the flames. "First there was a huge explosion," he said, "then a second huge blast that rattled the windows of my office. I saw the flame shooting up above the trees. I went outside, and there was a part of one of the plane's seats on my car." (Speaking French) This man was sitting eating his meal. "I heard a noise," he said. "It was Concorde making a turn as if it was trying to get back to the airport. It had an engine that was on fire. I can't tell you which one." Other eyewitnesses report seeing an explosion in the left-hand engines immediately after takeoff that may have broken off a section of wing. The plane tipped over as the pilot fought for control. SID HARE,, Pilot/Eyewitness: There's four engines on the Concorde, and the left side number one and number two engines, one of those obviously had a catastrophic failure because it was trailing flames 200 to 300 feet behind the airplane, and 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, and it just couldn't gain altitude. And 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 backsliding down toward the ground. JULIAN RUSH: The French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin has gone to the crash site. Britain is sending experts to join the crash investigation. The question now is why did it fall out of the sky in flames? Concorde has had just one accident in its 31-year history. A tire burst on landing in 1979. No one was injured. But there will inevitably be speculation that today's disaster may be connected to recent reports of cracks in the planes' wings. Only yesterday Air France said they posed no danger to passengers. JIM LEHRER: Later in the day, Air France said the passengers included 96 Germans, two Danes, one Austrian, and one American. There was no word on the nationalities of the crew or those killed on the ground.

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