Photo of the Concorde accident in July of 2000, which resulted in the death of over 100 victims
In July of 2000, a Concorde en route from Paris to New York City suffered engine failure shortly after takeoff when metallic debris from a burst tire caused a fuel tank to rupture and burst into flames. The aircraft crashed into a small hotel and restaurant. All 109 persons on board, including 100 passengers and 9 crew members, died; 4 people on the ground were also killed.
The claim that a metallic debris caused the crash was later disputed during the trial both by witnesses (including the pilot of Jacques Chirac’s aircraft that had just landed on an adjacent runway when Flight 4590 caught fire) and by an independent French TV investigation that found a wheel spacer had not been installed in the left-side main gear and that the plane caught fire some 1,000 feet from where the metallic strip lay. British investigators and former French
Concorde pilots looked at several other possibilities that the BEA report ignored, and they later concluded the Concorde veered off course on the runway, which reduced takeoff speed below the crucial minimum.
Prior to the accident, Concorde had been arguably the safest operational passenger airliner in the world in passenger deaths-per-kilometers travelled with zero, but there had been two prior non-fatal accidents and a rate of tire damage some 30 times higher than subsonic airliners from 1995 to 2000. Safety improvements were made in the wake of the crash, including more secure electrical controls. Accidents still occurred following the improvements, noteworthy ones being those of April 1989, March 1992, and in 2010.