Aérospatiale/BAC Concorde

Concorde was not unsafe by the standards of its era, but its record rests on very little flying. Up to 7 October 2026 our data holds one fatal accident, Air France flight 4590 in July 2000, in an estimated 64,000 passenger flights. That estimate could be off by half in either direction. With so few flights, the score leans almost entirely on how other jets of its generation performed, not on Concorde's own record.

What Concorde was

Aérospatiale and the British Aircraft Corporation built Concorde as a joint Anglo-French supersonic airliner. It first flew on 2 March 1969 and entered service on 21 January 1976. Twenty were built, but only the 14 production aircraft flew airline passengers, seven with Air France and seven with British Airways. It cruised at twice the speed of sound at about 55,000 feet and carried around 100 passengers, mostly between Paris or London and New York.

It was the first airliner with analogue fly-by-wireFly-by-wireA flight control system in which the pilot's inputs go to computers, which then move the control surfaces. Many such systems also stop unsafe manoeuvres.More in the glossary controls, but it had no flight envelope protection and a three-person cockpit with a flight engineer. We class it with the Gen 2 jets such as the DC-10 and the Boeing 727.

Concorde flew far less than other airliners: a few hundred flights per aircraft per year on long sectors. Our flight count is an estimate built from its published flying hours and the roughly 2.5 million passengers it carried, so treat it as approximate.

Air France 4590

On 25 July 2000 the Concorde took off from Paris for a charter flight to New York. At high speed on the runway a tyre ran over a metal strip that had fallen from a Continental Airlines DC-10 a few minutes earlier. The tyre burst and pieces struck the underside of the left wing, rupturing a fuel tank. Leaking fuel caught fire, two engines lost thrust and the landing gear would not retract. The aircraft crashed onto a hotel at Gonesse. All 109 people on board died, and four people on the ground. The French investigation agency, the BEA, named the tyre burst, the tank rupture and the ignition of the leaking fuel as the causes.

The crash counts toward the score: it was a passenger flight and an accident.

The tyre problem

Gonesse was not the first warning. On 14 June 1979 two tyres burst on take-off from Washington-Dulles; debris punctured three fuel tanks and damaged hydraulics and wiring, and the crew returned safely. Dozens of tyre failures were recorded before 2000. Concorde took off and landed fast, and its thin wing held fuel close to the wheels, so a burst tyre could do more harm than on a subsonic jet. After the crash the fleet was grounded, the tanks were lined with Kevlar and new tyres were fitted.

Other recorded accidents were not fatal. British Airways Concordes lost parts of the rudder at supersonic speed over the Atlantic in 1992 and 1998, and an Air France aircraft in 2003. The 1992 case was traced to a bonded honeycomb repair that had weakened. All three landed normally.

How to tell if you are on one

You will not be: the last commercial flight was on 24 October 2003 and none fly today. Several are in museums in France, the UK and the US. The ICAO code is CONC. For the method behind our numbers, see the aircraft methodology.