Fatal Seconds

As Air France Flight 4590 taxied into position on Charles de Gaulle Airport's Runway 24, Captain Christian Marty's eyes would have carefully scanned the 1960s-era round gauges in the Concorde's cockpit for any signs that the No. 2 engine was acting up. He didn't need the engine's thrust reversers--which are used to slow the plane on landing--during takeoff, but Marty had ordered them repaired just before leaving the gate. The engine, on the left side, would bear watching. Marty and his co-pilot, Jean Marcot, and the flight engineer ran through the normal takeoff checklist--engine power, hydraulics, radios--as they taxied onto the runway, setting the plane's iconic needle nose straight down the center line.

As all jet pilots do, Marty and Marcot would have taken one last, careful look down the runway, looking for objects on it--anything from a stray airport truck to the dreaded flocks of birds, which have caused problems for pilots at Charles de Gaulle for years. Marty knew the delicately engineered supersonic engines on the Concorde are particularly vulnerable to what the aviation community calls FOD: foreign-object damage. A piece of stray garbage, or rubber from a blown aircraft tire, passing through a high-speed turbine can cause the engine to fail--or worse. That is why military personnel usually scour runways before jet fighters take off and why commercial pilots check their tires. As he prepared the engine for takeoff, Marty's adrenaline may have surged a bit. Like any other Concorde pilot, he knew that takeoff for the big, beautiful marvel is the most demanding phase of flight.

There are three key speeds that jet jockeys worry about when they are rolling down a runway: V1, VR and V2. Marcot would have called out the speeds as they passed by: V1, the "takeoff-decision speed," at which pilots decide to continue or abort their takeoff; VR, the speed at which the pilot lifts the nose; and V2, the speed at which the plane leaves the ground. After passing V1, pilots are trained how to continue the takeoff--even if an engine fails or a tire blows. Somewhere between V1 and V2, things went wrong for Flight 4590. As his passengers felt the gentle tug of takeoff G forces, controllers in the tower urgently radioed one of the most terrifying warnings in aviation to Marty: your plane is on fire.

But at that point the plane was well past the go/no-go point, traveling at more than 210 m.p.h. A red light--perhaps a cascade of them--should have lit up the Concorde's flight-control panel. The flames coming from the two left engines suggest that they still could have been providing some power, but clearly not enough. A significant loss of thrust on the left side not only pushes the plane left (because the right engines are the only ones pushing forward) but also causes the dead engine wing to drop. As the Concorde struggled to gain altitude, its dead wing began acting like a weight, slowly turning the plane left. The heroism later attributed to Marty for flying away from the nearby village of Gonesse may have been misplaced. By that point, the jet was probably out of control.