Concorde maintenance and operational failures

Tom's claim that the 2000 Paris crash (runway debris from a preceding aircraft) was used as cover for retiring a fleet that was already past its useful life. Personal note: Tom mentions consulting for the company that dropped the debris.

So when they said they were going to retire them, they made a big deal of it because they had this crash of one of them in Paris — it was taking off and the aircraft ahead of it had dropped a piece of trash on the runway, and the Concorde hit it and caused it to crash. They said, ah, we're going to scrap the fleet. They were about ready to scrap the fleet anyway. It was past its useful life, so this was just an excuse. I actually ended up having to work for the company that dropped the trash on the runway, but anyway.