Events on July 25 in history

Concorde Air France Flight 4590 crashes at Paris Charles de Gaulle airport, killing 113 passengers.

Air France Flight 4590 was an international charter flight of Air France, from Charles de Gaulle Airport, Paris, to John F. Kennedy International Airport, New York, flown by an Arospatiale-BAC Concorde. On the afternoon of Tuesday, 25 July 2000, at 16:44:31 local time (UTC 14:44:31), the aircraft serving the flight (registration F-BTSC) ran over debris on the runway during takeoff, blowing a tyre, which threw chunks of tyre into the underside of the left wing and into the landing gear bay with great force.

The fuel tank built inside the left wing was full, with almost no ullage. When the tyre fragments struck the wing, the tank ruptured, thereby releasing large quantities of fuel. Tyre fragments severed wiring in the landing gear bay, preventing retraction of the landing gear. Fuel from the ruptured tank ignited, causing a loss of thrust in engines 1 and 2. Lack of thrust, high drag from the extended landing gear, and fire damage to the flight controls made it impossible to control the aircraft, which crashed into a hotel in nearby Gonesse two minutes after takeoff. All 109 people on board were killed, alongside four in the hotel. Six other people in the hotel were critically injured.The flight was chartered by German company Peter Deilmann Cruises. The passengers were on their way to board the cruise ship MS Deutschland in New York City for a 16-day cruise to Manta, Ecuador. It was the only fatal Concorde accident during its 27-year operational history.

The Aérospatiale/BAC Concorde () is a Franco-British turbojet-powered supersonic airliner that was operated from 1976 until 2003. It had a maximum speed over twice the speed of sound, at Mach 2.04 (1,354 mph or 2,180 km/h at cruise altitude), with seating for 92 to 128 passengers. First flown in 1969, Concorde entered service in 1976 and operated for 27 years. It is one of only two supersonic jetliner models to operate commercially; the other is the Soviet-built Tupolev Tu-144, which operated in the late 1970s.Concorde was jointly developed and manufactured by Sud Aviation (later Aérospatiale) and the British Aircraft Corporation under an Anglo-French treaty. Twenty aircraft were built, including six prototypes and development aircraft. Air France and British Airways were the only airlines to purchase and fly Concorde. The aircraft was used mainly by wealthy passengers who could afford to pay a high price for the aircraft's speed and luxury service. In 1997, the round-trip ticket price from New York to London was $7,995 (equivalent to $12,900 in 2020), more than 30 times the cost of the least expensive scheduled flight for this route.The original programme cost estimate was £70 million before 1962, (£1.39 billion in 2020). The programme experienced huge cost overruns and delays, with the programme eventually costing between £1.5 and £2.1 billion in 1976, (£9.44 billion-13.2 billion in 2020). This extreme cost was the main reason the production run was much smaller than expected. Another factor that affected the viability of all supersonic transport programmes was that supersonic flight could be used only on ocean-crossing routes, to prevent sonic boom disturbance over populated areas. With only seven airframes each being operated by the British and French, the per-unit cost was impossible to recoup, so the French and British governments absorbed the development costs. British Airways and Air France were able to operate Concorde at a profit after purchasing their aircraft from their respective governments at a steep discount in comparison to the programme's development and procurement costs.Among other destinations, Concorde flew regular transatlantic flights from London's Heathrow Airport and Paris's Charles de Gaulle Airport to John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, Washington Dulles International Airport in Virginia, and Grantley Adams International Airport in Barbados; it flew these routes in less than half the time of other airliners. While subsonic commercial jets took eight hours to fly from Paris to New York (seven hours from New York to Paris), the average supersonic flight time on the transatlantic routes was just under 3.5 hours.

Concorde aircraft were retired in 2003, three years after the crash of Air France Flight 4590, in which all passengers and crew members on board were killed; this was the only fatal incident involving Concorde. The general downturn in the commercial aviation industry after the September 11 attacks in 2001 and the end of maintenance support for Concorde by Airbus, the successor to Aérospatiale, contributed to the aircraft's retirement.