'When it hit the ground there was just a huge fireball, like a mini-atomic bomb had gone off'

Eyewitness Reports

The final moments of the doomed Concorde were relived by scores of eyewitnesses who had watched in horror while the fully laden airliner twisted, turned and plummeted to the ground.

The final moments of the doomed Concorde were relived by scores of eyewitnesses who had watched in horror while the fully laden airliner twisted, turned and plummeted to the ground.

As the pilot of the stricken aircraft fought to control the burning aircraft, onlookers reported seeing flames trailing from the back. A British eyewitness described how he and other workers at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris watched in silence after noticing flames 30 feet long shooting out of one of the wings immediately after take-off.

Julian Pyke said the aircraft was on fire when it flew over his head at about 500 feet while he and fellow workers watched from the airport's cargo area. "It's one of those experiences where everybody looks at everybody else [with a] it shouldn't be happening sort of feeling."

Mr Pyke said that everybody waited for the bang, but it never came. But they knew that the Concorde, with 109 passengers and crew on board, had crashed in the nearby town of Gonesse, south-west of the airport, when a huge plume of smoke, more than 1,000ft high, billowed into the air in the distance.

Once in the air, the airliner's journey was heart-breakingly short. Sid Hare, an American pilot, watched Concorde struggle, flounder and then plummet. "I knew it was in trouble," Mr Hare said adding that it was "obvious" that one of the four Olympus jet engines, on the left-hand side, had suffered catastrophic failure.

"My thought is that one engine probably failed on take-off, and may have damaged the engine next to it, and possibly that engine coming apart slung blades into the wing, which could have opened a fuel leak, and that would account for the huge fire coming out of the back of the airplane.

"It was obvious to me that the engine failure occurred during take-off. In fact, if I had to guess I would say that [the pilot] had engine failure before the airplane even left the ground, but had to continue take-off because he didn't have enough runway to get it stopped.

"The nose pitched up, almost straight, in the vertical, that much I know for sure, and after that, I'm not sure if it just started to backslide, or continued to fall over on the left side. At that point it was so near the ground it really didn't matter."

The crash site was two miles from the hotel from which Mr Hare was watching and he said he could not see the hotel into which the aircraft ploughed. "It was so low to the ground that it was obscured by the hotels... but it was a sickening sight," said Mr Hare, who works for the Fedex courier company. "When it hit, there was just a huge fireball, like a mini-atomic bomb had gone up."

The Concorde's death throes were also witnessed by Jamie Ritchie, a British businessman, from the window of an office in which he was having a meeting. "We heard a very loud roaring noise," he said. "We saw very briefly the tail of Concorde, and we saw something that was on fire fall from the tail into an open field. Then the plane crashed. There was a large plume of smoke, some 1,000 feet high."

Samir Hossein, 15, was one of the last to see the Concorde in the air. The burning aircraft passed over him and his friends as they played tennis. "We saw it lose altitude," he said. "Then it chopped off some trees and headed to the ground. The pilot tried to bank but the plane rolled over and smacked into the hotel, nose first and turned over."

Then, full of fuel for a transatlantic crossing, it appeared to explode. Samir says that he and his friends heard a huge boom.

One witness to the actual crash said that "at the point of impact, there was a huge ball of fire and an enormous plume of black smoke".

Another reported that the annexe of the 40-room Hotelissimo was immediately engulfed in flames. "I thought it was going to land in my office. I saw it coming down in flames and I fled," said Christian Dupont, the manager of a neighbouring hotel.

"Instead, it passed a few metres from the building and crashed into the hotel next door. It made a half turn ... then flipped over like a pancake," he said.

Nathalie Wycisk, an office worker in a building that stands just beyond the airport runway, said: "The pilot seemed to realise there was an enormous problem and tried to turn around but the plane fell straight down. When it tried to accelerate it caught fire behind. It fell directly on its wing. It wanted to turn around and - boom! - it just fell. Everything was shaking."

Within seconds of the Concorde leaving Charles de Gaulle airport all the passengers and crew were dead. In the blazing, wrecked Hotelissimo, three guests and a chambermaid were also reported to have perished.

Dozens of fire engines and ambulances arrived at the crash site within minutes but they were already too late. As firefighters fought to control the flames fanned by aviation fuel, the thick acrid smoke from the Concorde's first devastating crash could be seen for miles around, signalling an end to the legend of 25 years of safe supersonic air travel.