The Accident

The metal rod that punctured the Concorde's wheel	Flames coming out after catastrophic engine failure
Wreckage	Wreckage

An Air France Concorde en route to New York crashed outside Paris shortly after takeoff Tuesday, slamming into a hotel and a restaurant. At least 113 people were killed when the charter flight of mostly German tourists went down in the first-ever crash of the needle-nosed supersonic jet.

Police said all 100 passengers and nine crew members on board Flight AF4590 were killed, and the Interior Ministry said four others died at the 72-room Relais Bleus hotel. All the passengers were German except for one American and two Danes, Air France said.

At least a dozen people were injured at the hotel. They were in good condition, Prime Minister Lionel Jospin said.

Afterward, none of the Concordes was flying. Air France agreed to temporarily ground its five remaining Concordes, and British Airways, which owns the other seven Concordes, grounded its two remaining flights for Tuesday night.

The hotel the plane crashed into was in flames, and sections had been reduced to rubble and twisted metal. Firefighters poured streams of water on the blackened wreckage, which had broken up into scattered, smoking chunks. The remains of the Concorde were barely recognizable as an airplane fuselage.

There was no immediate word on what might have caused the crash of the jet, which had been in service since 1980, had flown 12,000 hours and had just had a mechanical checkup July 21. In the more than 30 years that Concorde jets have flown, none had gone down.

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