All language subtitles for Crash of the Concorde

Three, two, one, now.

Concorde.

The world's most advanced
passenger aircraft.

It took civil aviation

from 10 miles a minute
to 23 miles a minute

in one single stride.

Going up to
mach one, mach one.

A
technological masterpiece

that could travel at
twice the speed of sound.

It is just the
most perfect shape.

It's just beautiful to look at.

Then, 24
years into an flawless run,

the unthinkable happens.

Concorde had
an achilles heel.

Le bourget, le bourget.

We are trying to for le bourget.

Then there was
this huge explosion.

And I was totally
engulfed in flame.

It's an accident
that should never have happened.

July 25th, 2000,

was gearing up to be a
typically hectic summer's day

at Paris' Charles
de gaulle airport.

The holiday season
was in full swing.

And to add to the pressure,

the French president
Jacques chirac was flying in

from an international
summit in Tokyo.

It would have been a
very busy scene that day.

I mean, it was high summer.

There would have been plenty
of planes arriving, taking off,

and holiday makers arriving,
holiday makers leaving.

It was a classic, busy
airport in high summer.

On duty
in the southern tower

was air traffic
controller gilles logelin.

I was not supposed
to work that day,

but just the day before
a colleague asked me

if I could take his shift.

And the result of this
was that I was due to work

at the southern control tower.

Five miles
west of Charles de gaulle

was the small town of gonesse

that catered to people traveling
to and from the airport.

Gonesse is a name
that would have meant nothing

to anybody really in France.

It's really the
edge of the city,

it's where city meets field,

and it really literally does.

It's a strange one, no one
stays there for very long.

It just feels a bit
empty, transient.

It's an odd place.

It was a very
hot summer's day

and I had just arrived
into this hotel

because I was
meant to be meeting

a youth orchestra from the UK

and I was gonna be their
concert tour manager,

and I was looking forward to
a really good week with them.

When I got there, I
did think to myself,

this this is more the
budget end of hotels

rather than a luxurious hotel.

The walls were quite thin,

there was hardly
any soundproofing,

and because we were
just by a motorway

and the airport was behind US,

I was worried whether
it was going to be

a comfortable stay
for the guests.

I had some time to spare so
I thought about having a nap,

and in the end I decided
to phone my sister

who was in London at the time.

Flying to
New York that afternoon

was the most famous commercial
airplane in the world.

Concorde.

On board the air France
flight that day to New York

were 100 passengers,

and most of them were
related or friends,

and all from the
same German town.

These are people that,
you know, had saved up

and longed to
travel by concorde.

The
charter passengers

couldn't wait to tell you

it was their first trip,

they couldn't wait to tell
you that they'd saved up

to do this exciting trip,

and it was something
they'd always wanted to do.

They were on an aircraft that
had an amazing safety record,

and I'm sure it never
even crossed their minds

for one minute that
anything could go wrong.

On concorde,

the passengers knew
they were in good hands.

Concorde's pilots
were an elite,

there's no question about that.

They had to be.

Concorde did everything
much more quickly

than a normal aircraft

so you need to have that
slight fighter pilot mentality.

Piloting flight 4590

was 54-year-old Christian Marty.

Marty had over
13,000 flying hours

and had once successfully
wind-surfed across the Atlantic.

At 4:34 P.M.,

captain Marty taxied concorde
out to the holding point

for runway 26 right.

Air France 4590,
good day.

Taxi to holding point
26 right via Romeo.

Just
eight minutes later,

flight 4590 was given
clearance for takeoff.

Flight 4590,
runway 26 right.

Wind 098 knots.

In less
than 3 1/2 hours,

concorde was due to
touch down in New York.

Prepare for takeoff.

Is everybody ready?

Three, two, one, now.

But this time,

the experience would
be entirely different.

The aircraft was
gaining power as usual,

and then all of a sudden I
saw something incredible.

I saw a flame behind the plane.

I immediately informed
the pilot by radio

that there were flames
behind the aircraft.

4590, you have flames,
you have flames behind you.

And at the same
time I was talking

I still remember I pushed
the red alert button.

But what I knew
is that the plane

will have to
continue the takeoff.

Concorde
had passed v1,

the first critical
speed of any takeoff.

If you have a
problem of some sort after v1,

you are now committed to taking
that airplane into the air.

There is not sufficient
length of runway left

for you to guarantee
that you can stop safely

within the remaining length.

Seconds later,

gille logelin contacts
captain Marty again.

It's really burning,

and I'm not sure it's
coming from the engine.

The flames looks bigger
than at the beginning

so I give another second
information to the crew.

Every split second was important

because I knew that I wanted
to clear the air space

to enable the crew
of the concorde

to do whatever they wanted to do

to solve the problem.

Are you shutting
down engine two there?

I shut it down.

Le bourget, le bourget.

We are trying for le bourget.

What I remember very
well is the beating of my heart,

it was terrible.

I never experienced that before.

Despite the fire,

captain Marty attempts
to gain altitude.

So I was very busy
giving order to other aircraft.

At the moment, I didn't
watch the concorde

for a split second.

And I just saw kind of like
a big mushroom of smoke

coming from the ground.

Just two
minutes and seven seconds

from the start of
its takeoff run,

flight 4590 falls
out of the sky,

hitting a hotel outside gonesse.

So I'm on the
phone to my sister,

just having a routine
chat about things,

and then there was
this huge explosion.

I remember turning around
after the phone line went dead

and seeing the walls of
my hotel room caving in

and the pictures coming
down from the wall.

As soon as I opened
the door, of course,

I was totally engulfed in flame.

The heat was phenomenal.

It's hard to describe what it
was like being in that oven.

That was the moment where

literally my life
flashed before my eyes.

I knew I had to get
out of there,

I knew I was about to die,

and so you just do what
has to be done at the time.

I had a matter of split
seconds to just open the window

and jump out.

I remember thinking,

I have to stop breathing
now, I have to stop inhaling,

because it was toxic,

it was this black thick smoke.

I lowered myself down,

and then, obviously,
didn't have quite as far

to drop down to the ground,

and then just ran, ran, ran.

Four
others inside the hotel

were killed instantly.

Air France
4590, do you hear me?

Air France 4590, do you hear me?

I call twice and
ask air France 4590,

do you hear me?

I had no answer and then I
realize it was the end, yeah.

I just sat down on
the carpet and cried.

I can't imagine what it
was like on the airplane

for the passengers or the crew.

Horrible, terrible,
frightening, terrifying.

On July 25th, 2000,

100 passengers and
nine crew members

on board the concorde all died.

How could the most
thoroughly tested

commercial plane in history

undergo such a
catastrophic failure?

And what, or who, was to blame?

News caster: An air France
concorde has crashed near Paris,

killing everybody on board.

The picture
emerging at the moment

is pointing clearly to the
malfunction of an engine

and nothing else.

It was the most
profound shock.

It was something that
I'd always regarded

as almost inconceivable.

100 passengers
and all their baggage

from London to new
York in three hours.

That's the promise
of the concorde,

the joint anglo-French
supersonic aircraft.

Concorde
was a child of the 60s,

a combination of British
and French engineering

and technological brilliance.

What's interesting is
that this most beautiful

of all human-made artifacts,

its shape, its form
is pure engineering.

Every line on that machine

is the result of precise
mathematics and engineering.

There is no art with
a capital a involved.

It's the art of aerodynamics.

Now at maximum
speed, mach 2.2,

slicing through the
air twice as fast

as a bullet from a gun.

Concorde took aviation
in one single giant stride

from a pedestrian
600 miles an hour

to 1,350 miles an hour.

One great leap in
aviation history.

Concorde
first took to the skies

at the French testing
site in Toulouse

on march 2nd, 1969.

I will always
remember Raymond Baxter,

his commentary on
that first takeoff.

Baxter: Nose come up to
20 degrees, she's airborne.

She flies.

Concorde flies at last.

Six weeks later,

the maiden British flight

departed from
filton, near Bristol.

And she Rose.

1969 was the most
extraordinary year

in terms of great
aerospace achievements.

All is going
well and she's airborne.

That was the
year of the first

flight of the boeing 747.

It was the year of
the lunar landings.

And it was the year of
concorde's first flight.

Climbing at
4,000 feet a minute.

Just look at the beautiful lines
of that slender delta wing.

Climbing steeply
into the sunlit sky.

By
the new millennium,

concorde had
thousands of flights

under its elegant delta wings.

Extremely fine view
of the curvature of the earth

that we have up here today.

It was the world's
fastest passenger plane.

And regarded as
one of the safest.

I was working at
the French news agency

agence France-presse,

at which point I was
dispatched to the scene.

A plane crash is always
terrible, always big news.

The crash of concorde, though,

is in a different
league altogether.

And after a certain
point I got off the taxi

and then hoofed
it across fields,

and I suddenly found
myself milling around

at the operation center for
the emergency operation.

I'm left wondering
what I'm looking at.

I mean, there's no
sign of a fuselage

or the carcass of an aircraft.

What I did see were sort
of furrows in the ground,

and then the most striking
image which stays with me now,

these traffic cones
dotted around this field,

and then realizing
what they were

which is they were marking
bodies or parts of bodies.

But I felt much more closely

the human horror of all of this.

And when I reflected afterwards
on those traffic cones

being used as markers
for the bodies

and the sort of pithiness of it,

the horror of it came through.

After
the crash of concorde,

air France immediately
grounded its entire fleet.

French and British investigators
were called to the scene.

The phone rang,

and it was the duty coordinator.

He said, "it's the concorde."

And he said its crashed
into a hotel in Paris,

there are fatalities
on the ground,

everybody in the
aircraft is dead.

And it was the start
of quite an intense

emotional as well technical
and workload period.

Within hours,

the British investigation
team was heading to Paris.

Our business is
very evidence driven

and it's important to try
to get to an accident site

as soon as you practically can

because the quality of
evidence at that site

is not going to
improve with time,

it's going to decay with time.

France's bureau
d'enquetes took the lead

with assistance from britain's

air accident
investigation board.

I got to the accident
site the following morning

in company with our French
investigator colleagues

from the bureau d'enquetes.

It wasn't a huge accident site,

but within that perimeter it
was just total devastation.

It was one of the
most devastated sites

I think I've ever seen.

The team started
by examining the wreckage

and looking through photographs

of the plane's final moments.

Absolutely vital.

Photographs, as the
saying goes, don't lie.

The picture that
really caught our eye

right from the beginning

was the picture that
is seen from head on

with the aircraft, concorde,

heading towards you
with the flames.

I think we all
thought initially

that it was an engine fire,

and it was only some time into
the accident, hours, days,

that we started to
seriously wonder

if the fire had been
inboard of the engine,

based on the very fuzzy
photographs that we had

which seemed to show the
fuel coming out of the wing

and the fire inboard
of the engines.

Concorde had an
elaborate array of fuel tanks

in both wings and
parts of the fuselage.

Investigators soon discovered

a piece of wreckage
from one of the tanks

that could be the
source of the fuel leak.

The piece of tank
was completely unburnt.

It was clearly fuel tank

because it had the
sealant from fuel tanks

on the inside face.

But the paint on it was totally
unmarked by any heat damage.

So we were pretty sure
it was lower-wing skin.

They
eventually discovered

that it came from
fuel tank number five,

in front of the left-hand
undercarriage bay.

It really began
to seem to US

that it had to be a
ruptured fuel tank

that was releasing the fuel.

And so the question to US came,

well, how on earth
does that get ruptured?

A particular
feature of concorde

is that it's a delta wing.

And what that means is that
the distance on the wing

between the front of the
wing and the back of the wing

is very long compared to a
conventional configuration.

So the wing skins can
be very, very thin,

just a few millimeters,

compared to probably an inch
thick down at the wing root

on a conventional aircraft.

If
struck hard enough,

the delta wing was vulnerable.

But what could have hit it?

The team turned their
attention to the runway.

Material that was found
along the runway was crucial

as that was really the
source of this accident

and gave you a timeline between
the initiation of the event

all the way through
to when the aircraft

has left the ground.

On the runway we
found a piece of tire,

a very large piece of tire,

which was completely unburnt,

so it had obviously been
released from the aircraft

at a very early stage.

Throughout
its years of service,

concorde had suffered a
total of 57 tire failures.

Looking through
the records,

there had been a number
of previous cases

where concorde main tires

had lost tread or ruptured

and caused a certain
amount of damage,

including where fuel
tanks had been penetrated.

But what the Charles de
gaulle accident showed

was the previous cases

really hadn't been
properly addressed.

The concorde tires
had been subjected

to much higher
stress because, a,

they're on the runway going
up to much higher speeds.

In concords case, up
to around 200 knots

before the airplane lifts off.

And secondly because
the delta wing

doesn't generate
any lift in concorde

until you actually
present that wing

at an angle to the air flow.

The investigation
team now believed

it was a tire failure

that had fired a large piece
of rubber into a fuel tank,

causing a massive fuel release.

I think it was pretty
obvious that a tire had burst,

and from the nature of
the the damage to the tire

we started to form theories
as to what had happened.

Besides
the usual shredding

typical of a tire blowout,

the debris revealed a clean cut.

The tire was cut from
shoulder to shoulder

through the entire
depth of the tire.

Now that just was not
a normal tire blowout,

it looked like the
tire had been sliced

from corner to corner.

And it was possible
fairly rapidly to match that up

with a similar clean cut

on the remains of
the number two tire

which was still on the number
two main landing gear wheel

at the crash site.

Concorde had
two main landing gears

under the right and left wings.

Each was made of a bogie
beam carrying four wheels.

Number two tire was on
the front inner wheel

on the left-hand beam.

So the question
then was, well,

what could have caused
that clean cut in the tire?

On the
same part of the runway

as the tire debris,

they discovered a clue

that would change the
course of the investigation.

It was a metal strip
about an inch wide,

made of titanium,

about a bit longer than a ruler,

and it was treated with
aerospace quality materials.

It had rivets in it,
it had chromate primer,

and high temperature
sealant on it.

Not the sort of things

that you would normally
get just anywhere.

So we were sure it
was from an aircraft,

but it didn't look
very well made.

It almost looked like
something from a tractor.

It was immediately
clear that this metal strip

had to be the cause
of the tire blowout.

The shape of the strip
married very closely

to the cut between the two
pieces of tire that we had.

It was quite eerie
because it did not look

as if it could have
been just coincidence.

But how could this
insignificant strip of metal

bring down the world's

most sophisticated
commercial airliner?

If you drove your mini
over this piece of metal

you wouldn't expect
it to burst the tire.

The theory ended up being,
and validated in testing,

was that the piece of metal

had laid on the
runway on its edge,

and the tire had approached
it at just the right attitude

so that instead of
collapsing under the tire

it stayed on its edge and
penetrated deep into the tire.

It was almost inconceivable.

We had trouble believing it.

This was a
real breakthrough,

and I think everyone
in the room,

the bureau d'enquetes
folk, US aib,

we all sensed that
at the same time,

that suddenly we had a mechanism

that could result in that
sort of release of fuel.

It
was another chapter

in a story of cooperation
between age-old rivals.

The engineers,

the French and the
British engineers,

learned to get on very well.

Now remember, at the time,

many of them didn't
speak the same language,

so that was a problem.

British engineers thought
in imperial measurements,

French engineers thought
in metric measurements.

So there were these big gaps,

but what they shared, of course,

was a love of flight,
engineering, excitement,

a project that
would pushed them,

stretched them as far as
possible intellectually,

practically, and so on.

But there
were hitches along the way.

The first was a disagreement

over how concorde
should be spelled.

Concorde is a lovely
French word, of course.

It means fraternity,
it means togetherness.

And concorde was going
to be a great meeting

between the French
and the British.

The British decided

we can't be too French
about this, though.

So concorde when we
write it won't have an e

on the end of the word.

16 of
the world's airlines

on the threshold of
the supersonic age.

Finally, when the
first prototype aircraft

was put on display
in Toulouse in 1967,

and Tony benn,

who was the young minister
of technology then,

just did away with
that nonsense.

He said, "the aircraft
is called concorde,"

he said, "with an e."

And that meant excellence
and engineering

and he also said englishness,

which upset, of course,

the Welsh, the Irish,
and the Scottish.

Also, the politicians

didn't trust each other

over the finances.

Concorde was
the key note in London,

when britain's minister of
aviation Mr. Julian Avery

and France's
ambassador to britain

signed a joint agreement for
her development and production.

A clause was
inserted into the contract

stating that if one
side pulled out,

the other could sue.

With the development fee
estimated at 1.3 billion pounds,

over seven billion today,

neither side dared.

But by July 2000, concorde
had also cost one 113 lives.

As the investigation of concorde
flight 4590 moved forward,

it established a possible
theory behind the crash.

The joint French
and British team

had discovered a metal
strip on the runway

that almost certainly
had punctured

one of the plane's tires.

The blowout had
sent the tire debris

crashing into a fuel tank,

causing a leak and
a massive fire.

The team now had to find out
where the strip had come from.

The airport looked at

the previous departures
from that runway,

and one of those was a
continental airlines dc10.

And colleagues in the US went
and examined the aircraft

and discovered that a strip,

a sealing strip for
the thrust reverser,

was missing and the spacing
of the rivet holes matched up

with those on the strip
and found on the runway.

The French
judiciary now had its culprit.

They proceeded to sue
continental airlines,

demanding that it pay 70%

of the victims'
compensation claims.

With the investigation complete,

the French bureau d'enquetes
published the findings.

They concluded that
the metal strip

had triggered a disastrous
sequence of events,

resulting in the
failure of flight 4590.

The entire concorde fleet
on both sides of the channel

underwent the implementation
of new safety features.

But, as is often the case

with an accident
of this magnitude,

there was disagreement with
the report's conclusions

and a wide range of conjecture
by private citizens.

John hutchinson, who piloted
concorde for 15 years,

was one of the dissenters.

One of the first
things that struck me

when I read the
French accident report

was the amount of taxi fuel

that captain Marty
had opted to take.

Now the standard air
France taxi fuel figure

for flights out of
Charles de gaulle

was 1,000 kilos, one metric ton.

Captain Marty opted,
for whatever reason,

to take 2,000 kilos,
two metric tons,

twice the air France
standard figure.

Now that fuel would have
been located in tank 11,

right back there in the
tail cone of the airplane.

Now the significance of this is

because he only burnt off
800 kilos of that fuel

when he was cleared for takeoff,

that meant that there were
1.2 metric tons of fuel

located in tank 11 in
the tail cone there

that should not have been there.

This was compounded by the
fact that there were 19 bags

put on the airplane
at the last moment.

They were never weighed.

And we will never
know, of course,

exactly what those bags
would have weighed.

But bearing in mind these
were German passengers

going on a trip of a lifetime,

going on a cruise on the
cruise ship the deutschland,

I think it's safe to assume

that they were
pretty heavy bags,

and I think maybe 500 kilos
would be a reasonable estimate

of the weight of those bags.

Hutchinson
believes the unburned taxi fuel

and extra baggage

would have added 1.7 metric
tons to the aircraft,

putting it over the
maximum takeoff weight

and altering the plane's
center of gravity.

The significance of
the center of gravity

being too far off

essentially means that
the airplane becomes

very, very, very unstable,

and, if you get the center
of gravity too far off,

it becomes completely
uncontrollable, in fact.

And adding
to the weight issue

was the main flight fuel

that concorde was
carrying in its wings.

Now, the refueling
procedures with concorde

were that you could not
overfill those tanks,

that would be cut
off automatically

at around 82-83%
of tank capacity

so that you had air
space left in the tanks.

Now on that day captain
Marty authorized

the overriding of
that protection

and instructed the refuelers

to fill the tanks in the
wing completely full.

So captain Marty
started his takeoff,

the airplane's accelerating
down the runway,

it's gone past v1,
v1 was 150 knots.

And at 176 knots,

this front right-hand tire

on the left-hand
undercarriage leg

ran over a piece of titanium,

and that piece of
titanium sliced off

a 4 1/2-kilo lump of
rubber from this tire.

Now that lump of rubber
parted company with the tire

more or less with the
velocity of a missile

and it went
absolutely slamming up

into the underside of the
wing by tank number five

and it set up a shock
wave in that fuel tank.

With no air
space in the fuel tank

to absorb the shock wave,

the energy ruptured
the tank skin.

And that's a
direct consequence

of captain Marcy's decision

to override the normal
refueling processes.

Other
crash site evidence

contributed to hutchinson's
human error theory.

Flight 4590's final
movements on the runway

were recorded in
thick sooty tracks.

They revealed that
the plane veered

dramatically to the left.

The other features on the
runway were a blob of fuel

almost immediately followed
by a very heavy trail of soot.

And the trail, surprisingly,

started veering off to the
left, away from the center line,

to the point where the
left main landing gear

ran onto the grass and
struck the runway edge light.

It may be
that the plane lost thrust

on both engines
under the left wing.

But why hadn't the
captain corrected it?

If an airplane
starts veering to the left,

you put it in right rather
to keep it straight.

The flight data
recorded showed

that the pilot who was
handling the aircraft

had put the right pedal on

but it hadn't gone
the full right pedal,

which is is kind of weird.

With
his interest piqued,

Tony cable and a
British airways engineer

inspected the landing
gear wreckage.

It wasn't very easy

because it had been
removed from the site

and just thrown in piles
really in a warehouse,

and the ba guy fairly
rapidly noticed

that there was
something not right

with the left main landing gear,

in that there appeared
to be a part missing.

The four wheels
on the main landing gear

were fixed to a bogie beam
that could pivot up and down.

The two bearings that
allowed this movement

were held in place by
a cylindrical spacer

that ensured the two pairs
of wheels, left and right,

were kept in proper alignment.

It was this spacer
that was missing.

One week before the crash,

the landing gear
had been serviced.

When it was reassembled,

the maintenance crew failed
to put the spacer back.

Procedures for
maintaining aircraft

are all laid down
in great detail.

But, inevitably, on occasions,
you do get human error.

Could the missing
spacer have contributed

to the pilot's failure to
keep the plane on the runway?

The fact that he
was unable to control

that veering off to the left

is as much as anything
due to the fact

that the spacer was missing,

and with the spacer missing

those wheels could wobble around

like wheels on a
supermarket trolley.

By
veering to the left,

flight 4590 put itself on a
potential collision course

with a boeing 747 at
the side of the runway.

It was the same
plane that carried

the French president
Jacques chirac and his wife.

To avoid the 747,

captain Marty was forced to
pull back on the control column

and get concorde airborne.

But the fate of flight
4590 was already sealed.

The airspeed,
the airspeed.

Le bourget, le bourget.

We are trying for le bourget.

Too late, no time, no.

As concorde flight
4590 attempted to take off,

it veered to the
edge of the runway,

putting it on a potential
collision course

with a boeing 747.

Captain Marty was
forced to lift off

at a speed well below 200 knots,

concorde's minimum
takeoff speed.

The surprising
thing that was shown

by the flight data
recorded data was that

the pilot had rotated
early for takeoff,

in other words,

at a lower speed than
they would normally do,

and quite critical
on the concorde

because of the delta wing.

The minimum drag speed
is very, very high.

It is the one thing
you would never do,

is to rotate early,

because you're creating
an enormous amount of drag

as you lift the nose of the
airplane and the wing with it,

and that drag is greater than
the thrust of the engine,

and so the nose will drop and
it'll stall out, whatever.

I can imagine
that the captain

simply hold back on
the control column

and so he didn't
go into the grass

to the side of the runway.

Once
concorde was airborne,

the investigation
relied on information

from the flight data and
cockpit voice recorders,

the black boxes.

What they revealed

made an already desperate
situation even worse.

Watch out.

As the
aircraft got airborne,

the fire warning for the
number two engine went off.

So that light here
would have lit up

and the fire warning
bell would have operated.

What should have happened is

that the flight
engineer should then

have canceled the oral warning

so that it doesn't
distract the pilot.

He'd do that with
this switch here.

And he would have then
selected contingency thrust

on the reheats on
these switches here,

giving another 8% or
so of reheated thrust.

And then no further action
should have been taken

until the aircraft was
safely climbing away.

And then the crew would have
gone through the fire drill

and then carry out all the
rest of the check list.

What actually
happened on that day,

uncommanded by the captain,

the flight engineer,
at around 28 feet,

so literally just as the
aircraft had got airborne,

he went straight
into a fire drill.

He pulled that fire handle
which shuts that engine down.

And the unfortunate thing
was that that engine

was actually
producing some power.

Shutting engine two.

Shut down engine two.

And now, obviously,

it was generating no
power at all.

Are you shutting
down engine two there?

I've shut it down.

Engine number
two had never been on fire.

It wasn't
a fire warning

in the conventional
sense of the word.

It was an overheat warning

caused by this
blowtorch of flame

going past the
number two engine,

which is what triggered
that fire warning.

So, basically, the
airplane at this stage

was now flying with sort of
2 1/2 engines as it were.

If they'd stuck to
operating the airplane

in a standard way,

then I would argue that
crash wouldn't have happened.

Despite the
plausibility of theories

promoted by enthusiastic and
knowledgeable individuals,

the conclusions of the
professional investigation team

are not in dispute.

They stand by the accident
report's findings.

My belief is
this crew operated

to the best of their capability.

They didn't get everything
right in terms of procedure,

but actually the things where
they deviated from procedure

I don't believe actually caused

any difference with
the accident at all.

Any accident, particularly
a tragic one like this,

is where a number of
things come together.

And on this particular
day we had coming together

a particular piece of
metal lying on a runway,

an aircraft happening
to run over that

at a speed where it's
going too fast to stop,

and you have a wing
structure there

which has a vulnerability.

The things about the
slight overweight,

other things like
that, like the spacer,

very small effects.

Those are not really
factors in this at all.

And at the end of
the day we think

the bureau d'enquetes
report was just about right.

Concorde
eventually resumed service,

but the supersonic airliner
fell victim to 9/11

and the downturn in
international travel.

Air France was the first
to ground its fleet.

And unable to bear the huge
maintenance costs alone,

British airways was
forced to follow suit.

The decision to
pursue concorde was state-led

by the British government,
the French government,

for all sorts of
reasons about prestige,

about getting the technology

before the Americans,
the Soviet union,

and commercial arguments

probably didn't enter
as much then

into the equation as they
would do certainly now.

Therefore we have at
the end of the day

a beautiful plane
which looks amazing

crosses the Atlantic at
this extraordinary speed,

but it only takes 100
people on board, it's tiny.

The logic of it now
looks almost laughable.

Good morning to
you, nice to see you.

Mind your head as
you board, hello.

On
October 24th, 2003,

concorde flew for the last time.

I loved it.

I never, ever thought

when I used to drive
from here to Heathrow

I never even considered
that it was work.

Plane engine whooshing

But for some,

the name concorde
will always evoke

different memories and emotions.

I was at the wrong
place at the wrong time,

or could be considered the
right place at the right time,

so I was extraordinarily
fortunate to be

in one of the handful of rooms

that the fire didn't
reach quite as soon.

It has made me think more
differently about life

because you realize
just how fragile it is,

and you realize,
more importantly,

the utter
unpredictability of it.

For me, after 20
years, it's different.

The time has passed, you know?

So I can speak
about the accident,

even though I feel the emotion,

because I feel a bit like
if I was in the plane.

Obviously I'm not a survivor,
I was not in the crash,

but in a way I survived
something, too.