On 25 July 2000, Air France Flight 4590 took off from Paris en route to New York. The passengers were heading off on a Caribbean cruise, in what contemporary reports described as a “vacation of a lifetime” – heartbreakingly, nobody on board made it to their end destination, explored in Channel 4's Concorde Crash: Days That Shocked the World.
Just 80 seconds after take-off, a Concorde aeroplane crashed into a hotel in Gonesse, in the north-eastern suburbs of Paris, France, killing all 109 people on board. One hundred passengers and nine French crew members lost their lives in total, and a further four people on the ground also died, bringing the death toll to at least 113, according to the official accident report.
Who were the passengers on Concorde Flight 4590?
The passengers came from a range of backgrounds. There were wealthy business owners, teachers who had saved for years, a famous football coach, children and entire families travelling together.
According to the BBC, 96 of the passengers were German. The others included two Danes, an American and an Australian.
The western German city of Mönchengladbach was particularly badly affected; thirteen of its residents died, including several prominent local business owners, according to CBS News.
Kurt Kahle, 51, ran a private business school. He was travelling with his 37-year-old wife and their eight-year-old son, Michael. A friend described him as a warm and well-liked man who “knew how to live life to the full”.
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Former Bundesliga football trainer Rudi Fassnacht, 65, was also among the passengers, travelling with his wife Sigrid.
Society photographer Christian Goetz, 60, and his wife Irene Vogt-Goetz, 59, had both survived cancer. They had booked the Concorde trip to celebrate what they saw as a new beginning.
Did entire families die in the Concorde crash?
Sadly, yes. Businessman Christian Eich, 57, died alongside his wife, their two children and his wife’s parents. Eich managed BMW’s museum and shared a love of classic cars with his father-in-law, Andreas Schranner.
Schranner, a retired property millionaire from Munich, was 64. He had planned to celebrate his 65th birthday during the cruise. He, his wife Maria, their daughter Andrea, son-in-law Christian and grandchildren Maximilian, 10, and Katharina, eight, were all killed.
The children had reportedly left school early to go on the trip. ABC News reported that the youngest victims were aged seven and eight. In the days after the crash, teachers had the devastating task of telling their classmates that some children would not be returning.
Schoolteachers Rolf and Doris Maldry and Klaus and Margret Frentzen had spent years saving for the luxury holiday. For the Frentzens, the trip was intended to be the honeymoon they had never taken after having their three children.
Who was the Concorde pilot?
The flight’s pilot, Christian Marty, was 54 and had qualified to fly Concorde only a year earlier. Investigators described him as a highly professional pilot with an ability to analyse problems clearly.
His co-pilot, Jean Marcot, had helped set a Concorde round-the-world flying record in 1992, completing the journey in 33 hours and one minute.
For all of them, the flight was meant to mark the beginning of a special holiday. Instead, it became one of the most devastating aviation tragedies in modern history.
Following the crash, the public's confidence in Concorde as a mode of travel was severely damaged and the planes were retired from commercial use in 2003.
