Tourists Go On, Despite Concorde Crash

July 27 -- Six people missed the tragic Concorde flight because it was overbooked — six people who had planned to travel with 12 others on a “dream cruise” to South America.

And now, there are six people about the MS Deutschland who will be more conscious than anyone of the empty deckchairs — 12 in particular.

The six, from Germany’s Monchengladbach region, have decided to go on with the tour as scheduled, because that is what they think their friends would have wanted.

Renate and Ernst Zimmermanns, Rita and Werner Wormann, Bernd Coettges and travel agent Werner Glatzel, who organized the tour, rejected an offer of a trip home and a refund by the Peter Deilmann cruise line.

“It is our way of remembering them and all the happy times we had together,” says Glatzel.

Deadly Obligations; Lifesaving Thrift

But at least one person changed plans so they could be on that fateful flight. Jochen Appenrodt, 62, wanted to take a later trip to the Olympic Games in Sydney, Australia. But a sense of duty told him to go earlier — a sense that would cost him his life.

Appenrodt, an assistant school principal from Kamp-Linfort, who was also a past treasurer of the German Light Athletic Association, saw that part of the trip he originally planned coincided with the start of the new school year, so he changed his plans.

His only son is a pilot, enabling him to claim a reduced fare on the Concorde.

“As a schoolmaster he of course wanted to be an example to his pupils, so he did not ask for special leave,” said his friend, Franz-Josef Probst, president of the Light Athletic Association in the North Rhine region. “He took the Caribbean trip instead.”

A couple of hundred marks probably saved the lives of Werner and Sylvia Stolze, of Frankfurt. They gave one another the tickets for the cruise as birthday presents, intending to celebrate their 52nd birthdays and silver wedding anniversary on the ship.