Survivor of Concorde Crash Recalls Fiery Ordeal
July 26, 2000 -- In her first-floor room in the front of the Hotelissimo, Alice Brooking was talking to her sister, Nathalie, on the telephone when she heard the tremendous thundering explosion.
“I heard what sounded like a plane taking off,” Brooking, 21, later told reporters. “It just got gradually louder until it really was deafening, at which point the whole floor started to tremble and I realized something was up.”
Brooking, a tour manager with Club Europe, a school tour operator, had just arrived at the small hotel in the rural town of Gonesse outside Paris. She had set her bags down, Brooking recalled to reporters, and only had a moment to call her sister, when the Air France Concorde carrying 109 passengers and crew went down in flames and slammed into the hotel Tuesday. All those aboard, and four people on the ground were killed. Another 12 were injured. The hotel burned to the ground.
Presumed Dead
As the hotel burned, Brooking was initially reported by officials as one of the deceased.
“I don’t want to make myself into a heroine,” she later told reporters. “I was lucky.”
At 4:44 p.m. local time, the Concorde jet came crashing down into the back of the Hotelissimo, instantly setting the hotel afire. Brooking dropped the telephone, ran to the door and opened it to a wall of flames, she said.
Brooking says she then headed for the window, looked down and saw the hotel receptionist waiting with open arms. “I looked out the window and saw the receptionist down beneath me in the car park. So I asked ‘What should I do? He said ‘You have to jump.’ So I jumped.’
Heat, Smoke and Debris
“Then I just remember a lot of debris,” said Brooking, a student in her fourth and final year studying modern languages at Selwyn College, Cambridge University. “I inhaled a lot of smoke, but obviously that wasn’t a good idea. Then the heat was absolutely amazing. It was like being in an oven. Outside — lots and lots of flames, lots of gray smoke. Debris everywhere.”
As chaos erupted in the hot flames and billowing white smoke around the crash site, Brooking ran for her life — literally — in bare feet across a field next to the hotel. She and the receptionist, she said, flagged down motorists on the nearby highway, she said. Her first thought, she said, was to find a mobile phone to call back her sister in London and let her know she was OK.
Alive Among the Dead
The hotel behind her was engulfed in flames, and Brooking says she never really saw the massive wreckage behind it.“I didn’t see anything to do with the plane,” she said. “By the time I was out of the hotel, it was all in flames, and you couldn’t see anything.”
Only after reaching the roadway did Brooking realize that the Concorde had crashed. Death had fallen around her. All 109 aboard had perished as did four people inside the hotel. Brooking escaped, with burns to one of her hands.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.