
What Went Wrong: The Concorde Accident
For nearly three decades the Concorde carried passengers across the Atlantic in three hours at twice the speed of sound, a symbol of aerodynamic ambition and airline luxury. This episode of the What Went Wrong series reconstructs Air France Flight 4590, which crashed moments after leaving Charles de Gaulle airport on July 25, 2000, killing all 109 people aboard and four more on the ground. Using accident investigation footage, technical diagrams, and expert testimony, the film traces the chain of failure back to a strip of titanium debris left on the runway by a preceding aircraft, the tire that burst on contact with it, and the fuel tank rupture that followed. It examines how the Concorde's design, prized for speed and elegance, left little margin for this kind of damage, and how regulators and engineers had flagged tire problems on earlier flights without grounding the fleet. The episode lays out the sequence of decisions and oversights, mechanical and institutional, that turned a runway mishap into a fatal crash and effectively ended supersonic passenger travel.