From staff and wire reports
PARIS -- An Air France Concorde en route to New York City crashed outside Paris shortly after takeoff Tuesday, slamming into a hotel in the town of Gonesse and killing 113 people, French officials said.
Interior Ministry officials said all 109 aboard the chartered flight and at least four people on the ground were killed.
The crash took place shortly before 5 p.m. local time (1500 GMT / 11 a.m. EDT), after takeoff from Paris' Charles de Gaulle airport. "It was a sickening site, a huge fireball," eyewitness Sid Hare told CNN.
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Concorde info:
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The Concorde jet is capable of traveling from Paris to New York in three hours, 45 minutes at a cruising speed of Mach 2 or 1,370 miles per hour.
Capacity: Its seating capacity is 100 passengers and it usually has a crew of nine.
Daily service between New York and Paris started in 1977.
The Concorde holds two world speed records for commercial flights. In 1992, it circled the globe from east to west in 32 hours, 49 minutes and three seconds. Three years later, the Concorde flew west to east in 31 hours, 27 minutes and 49 seconds.
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Hare said the crash occurred about two miles from the hotel where he is staying.
France's LCI television quoted eyewitnesses as saying the aircraft was not able to gain sufficient altitude before it crashed, and that police were keeping onlookers away from the site.
"The airplane was struggling to climb and obviously couldn't get altitude," Hare, a pilot for Federal Express, said via telephone from France.
He said the Concorde had reached an altitude of about 200 feet before flames started shooting out from a left-side engine.
"He (the pilot) kept raising the nose ... and the airplane stalled, the nose went straight up into the air and the airplane actually rolled over to the left and almost inverted when it went down in huge fireball when it hit (the ground)," Hare said.
France Info radio quoted another eyewitness as saying the plane's motor was on fire and that a huge cloud of black smoke went up in the air.
British Airways said Monday it had found cracks in the wings of some of its supersonic aircraft, but said there was no danger to passengers.
The Concorde, which crosses the Atlantic at 1,350 mph, has been considered among the world's safest planes. Its only major scare came in 1979, when a bad landing blew out a plane's tires. The incident led to a design modification.
The plane is popular with celebrities, world-class athletes and the rich. It flies above turbulence at nearly 60,000 feet, crossing the Atlantic in about 3 1/2 hours, less than half that of regular jetliners.
The first Concorde flew in 1969. Now, 13 of the needle-nosed supersonic jets are operated by Air France and British Airways. A round-trip Paris-New York ticket costs $9,000, roughly 25 percent more than regular first class. A London-New York round-trip runs $9,850.
Air France officials have said in the past that their current fleet is fit to fly safely until 2007.
Paris Bureau Chief Peter Humi and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
