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A Known Flaw: How 57 Tire Blowouts Led to Concorde's Tragic End
The fiery crash of Concorde Flight 4590 wasn't a freak accident. It was the catastrophic culmination of a known design flaw that had caused 57 previous tire blowouts. This is the story of the warnings that were tragically ignored, leading to the demise of a supersonic icon.
On July 25, 2000, the world watched in horror as Air France Flight 4590, a magnificent Concorde supersonic airliner, erupted into a plume of fire and smoke just moments after takeoff from Paris. The crash, which claimed the lives of all 109 people on board and four on the ground, seemed like a sudden, tragic accident. The official cause was quickly identified: a metal strip on the runway, dropped by a preceding aircraft, shredded one of Concorde's tires. The flying debris then ruptured a fuel tank, sparking the inferno. But this was not a bolt from the blue. It was the predictable, catastrophic conclusion to a problem that had plagued the Concorde for decades.
A History of High-Speed Failures
The crash of Flight 4590 was the first fatal incident in Concorde's 27-year history, a record that contributed to its aura of invincibility. However, hiding beneath that sterling safety record was a shocking statistic: prior to the 2000 disaster, there had been 57 recorded incidents of tire blowouts or damage on Concorde during takeoff. The aircraft's design, a marvel of engineering, had an inherent vulnerability. Its takeoff speed was an incredible 250 mph (400 km/h), placing immense stress on its specialized tires. The delta-wing design also placed the fuel tanks directly above the landing gear, meaning any high-velocity debris from a blowout was aimed directly at the aircraft's most volatile component.
The 1979 Dulles Near-Disaster
The most chilling dress rehearsal for the Paris tragedy occurred 21 years earlier, on June 14, 1979, at Washington Dulles International Airport. As an Air France Concorde accelerated for takeoff, two of its tires blew out. The resulting shrapnel did devastating damage. It punctured three separate fuel tanks, severed hydraulic lines, and cut through electrical cables. The debris tore a large hole in the top of the wing, with fuel gushing out. Miraculously, the vapor did not ignite. The crew managed to abort the takeoff and the incident, while serious, was not catastrophic. It was a clear demonstration of exactly how a tire failure could lead to a fatal disaster, yet the fundamental design vulnerability remained unaddressed. Changes were made to the tires and maintenance procedures, but the inherent risk of a high-energy blowout near the fuel tanks persisted.
Normalization of Deviance
Why was such a clear and present danger allowed to continue? The answer may lie in a psychological phenomenon known as the “normalization of deviance.” When a known flaw or risky procedure is repeated without catastrophic failure, it gradually becomes accepted as a normal, manageable part of operations. Each successful flight following a tire incident reinforced the belief that the problem, while not ideal, was not life-threatening. This dangerous mindset has been a key factor in other major engineering disasters, most notably the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion, where known issues with O-rings were repeatedly downplayed until they led to tragedy.
The weakness was that we had 30 years of operations with a number of tyre bursts, which had never previously been catastrophic. Every time a tyre burst, you would get a series of recommendations, and each of those recommendations was designed to prevent a recurrence of that failure. It was felt that the problem had been licked.
The Final Alignment of Failure
The tragedy of Flight 4590 can be seen as a textbook example of the “Swiss Cheese Model” of accident causation. This model posits that disasters occur when holes in multiple layers of defense line up. For decades, Concorde flew with a known “hole”: the vulnerability of its tires and fuel tanks. On previous incidents, other layers of defense held; the debris missed the tanks, or the leaking fuel didn't ignite. But on that July day in Paris, all the holes aligned perfectly: a foreign object was on the runway, the tire struck it, the resulting debris was of a specific size and trajectory, it hit the fuel tank at its weakest point, and the gushing fuel found an ignition source. The 57 previous incidents were not just minor issues; they were 57 warnings that the holes in the cheese were there. On the 58th time, they all lined up, and the icon of supersonic travel fell from the sky, its demise not just an accident, but an inevitability written in its own history.