Last Days of the Concorde

The Crash of Flight 4590 and the End of Supersonic Passenger Travel

By: Samme Chittum

Narrated by: Teri Schnaubelt

Length: 8 hrs and 53 mins

Publisher's Summary

The gripping true tale of a devastating plane crash, the investigation into its causes, and the race to prevent similar disasters in the future. 

On July 25, 2000, a Concorde, the world's fastest passenger plane, was taking off from Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris when it suddenly burst into flames. An airliner capable of flying at more than twice the speed of sound, the Concorde had completed 25 years of successful flights, whisking wealthy passengers - from diplomats to rock stars to corporate titans - between continents on brief and glamorous flights. Yet on this fateful day, the chartered Concorde jet, en route to America, crashed and killed all 109 passengers and crew onboard and four people on the ground. Urgent questions immediately arose as investigators scrambled to discover what had gone wrong. What caused the fire? Could it have been prevented? And, most urgently, was the Concorde safe to fly? Last Days of the Concorde addresses these issues and many more, offering a fascinating insider's look at the dramatic disaster, the hunt for clues, and the systemic overhauls that followed the crash.

©2018 Cineflix Media Inc. and Smithsonian Institution (P)2019 Tantor

A Solid Introduction

Chittum's focus is steady if somewhat distant from the precipitating event in Concorde's demise, providing a nice ingress into a subject. The tone is scholarly but with a journalist's linguistic accessibility (there are no obtuse phrases like, "journalist's linguistic accessibility," in Chittum's book, and it's the better for it.). She introduces us to some of the key figures in the events of Concorde's crash and does a serviceable job conveying the emotional toll of that horrible day and the subsequent aftermath.

Chittum plays the aftermath pretty much down-the-middle, a totally valid choice that, none-the-less limits the potential resonance of a book about Concorde. There's a brief section about the reaction of Queens (New York) residents to the cessation of Concorde flights that illuminated some of the socio-economic impacts of Concorde. In addition to being a technological marvel, and beautifully crafted airplane, it was also a plaything of the super-rich that significantly degraded the lives of citizens living beneath its flightpath. The sentiments of residence living near JFK airport was better characterized as, "good riddance," than sorrow about the cessation of Concorde flights.

The detour in Queens was brief and Chittum sticks primarily to the accident that brought down Concorde and the reconstruction of that accident by investigators. It's a zippy narrative that I enjoyed.

Narration: I don't think I ever once thought about the narrator, which earns it an A+ in my book.

Note to publisher: That cover design is some rough stuff. It is, objectively, a nice design, but one would be challenged to come up with a less sympathetic image. Holy mother.

End of an Era

Chittum does a good job of describing the chain of unlikely events that culminated in the crash, and ultimately, the scrapping of the Concorde. She casts the loss of the unique aircraft as a loss to the world of aviation, and so it is.

Teri Schnaubelt's narration grows more irritating as she plods her way through endless lists of measurements rendered at least twice each - once in imperial measure, once again in metric - and occasionally three times as she converts feet to yards or yards to miles.

Clearly, Chittum intended her book to be a definitive source of information on the topic, but perhaps the overwhelming pile of data could have been included in an appendix where it would not have cluttered the narrative with numbers and measurements.

Captivating

Narrator is brilliant. The inside detail is not all distracting. Rather, it makes the story m ore personal and intimate.

great inside story

when it is concorde no questions asked. liked the narrators voice!. great book hope to have some more about concorde.

Overall very good

Although there are small technical mistakes (e.g., “knots per hour”), generally this complicated subject was well-explained. It made for a fascinating read. And the narrator did a good job with the French pronunciation.

nice to have the story in one place

It's a pretty good book but I also found the constant conversion of units to be a little bit annoying. There were also more than a couple of occasions where the wrong units were used all together for example when she mentioned several thousand tons of fuel :). I've not quite sure I understand her changing voices when she was quoting men speaking. In any case it was an interesting and sometimes emotional listen that provided cohesion for information which I mostly already knew.

A Fair review

I thought I'd check this book out to see if there was any greater level of detail as to the Concord flight that famously took off in a ball of fire. Nothing much new here other than some of the investigation information and a great level of detail on the pilots and passengers - which I appreciated. In starting the book I wondered if it would be possible had they NOT gone airborne and just forced the plane back onto the ground over the runway had they stood a chance of at least some surviving the inferno. They went into that aspect of things as the post-crash analysis revealed it wouldn't have changed the outcome. Never mind that decision would have had to come against every aspect of training the pilots had and they had no information available at the time to even consider something different.

Needed editing and fewer units.

Many errors, very grating conversion of every measurement unit used (and many not even correct).

Very detailed

Running re-cap tires (to 1996) on a plane that takes off at the speed of a formula one car and has the weight of a bulldozer on them. 5 times the rate of tire failure compared to subsonic planes.

Disappointing

As an Engineer, a historian and a reader of many aviation history books, I looked forward to this detailed account of the tragic demise of that most wonderful of European aircraft — Concorde. However, I am left very frustrated with this over-detailed and repetitive account, and am thus moved to write this review. Although the flow is good and the depth of content is broadly satisfying, it could have been kept much more concise, without losing the vital detail. The continual translation of every technical measurement into both metric and imperial units is particularly grating (& entirely unnecessary). Matters are made considerably worse by the significant number of factual and technical inaccuracies throughout — there is no excuse for the obvious lack of fact checking and these mistakes then making it into print. Even more grating is the fairly awful narration — this is essentially a story featuring the French & the British, yet the American narrator was quite unable to correctly pronounce many of the (mainly English) names. Very irritating!