From staff and wire reports
PARIS -- French officials said at least 113 people were killed Tuesday when an Air France Concorde en route to New York City crashed into a hotel near Paris shortly after takeoff from Charles de Gaulle airport.
Interior Ministry officials said all 109 aboard the chartered flight and at least four people on the ground died when the Concorde went down in the town of Gonesse, about 10 miles (15 km) north of Paris.
The plane, Flight AF 4590, was chartered by a German company, Peter Deilmann River and Ocean Cruises. French media reports said the 100 passengers were all German tourists, but there was no official confirmation. In New York, the passengers were scheduled to embark on a sea cruise, Air France said.
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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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The crash took place at 4:44 p.m. local time (1444 GMT / 10:44 a.m. EDT), just after the plane took off.
"It was a sickening site, a huge fireball," eyewitness Sid Hare told CNN. "The airplane was struggling to climb and obviously couldn't get altitude."
Hare, a Federal Express pilot who was at a hotel near the airport, said the plane went down in a ball of fire. He said he could "see smoke trailing" from one of the plane's two left engines before the crash.
"It started rolling over and backsliding down to the ground. At that point it was probably two miles from me," he told CNN.
Eyewitnesses said the aircraft was not able to gain sufficient altitude before it crashed. Hare said the Concorde had reached an altitude of about 200 feet before flames started shooting 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.
Tuesday's disaster was the first time a Concorde jet has crashed since the plane went into service in 1969. Now, 13 of the needle-nosed supersonic jets are operated by Air France and British Airways.
On Monday, British Airways said it had found cracks in the wings of some of its seven Concordes, but said there was no danger to passengers.
In light of the crash in France, British Airways said that it was reviewing what action to take with its own Concordes.
Asked whether the airline would ground the planes, a BA spokeswoman said: "We have pulled together all the senior management of the Concorde to review the situation. An announcement will be made shortly."
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.
On January 30 of this year, a Concorde aircraft made an emergency landing at London's Heathrow Airport -- the second such landing within a 24-hour period by one of the supersonic jets.
A cockpit alarm had sounded, warning of a fire in the rear cargo hold, but engineers found no problem.
The previous day, one of four engines had shut down on a Concorde as it approached Heathrow.
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 the time that regular jetliners take.
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, The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
