CHRISTOPHER STEVENS: The Concorde crash is a fascinating story - but why only tell half of it?

Concorde Crash: Days That Shocked The World (C4)

Rating: Two stars out of five

The sound of Concorde, a sort of approaching rumble, was so distinctive that you didn't have to look up when it went overhead. But we always did. There was no sight like it.

On the day 23 years ago when the supersonic aircraft took to the skies for the final time, people stood and stared all along its flightpath. That machine was loved, in a way I don't believe any other jet aeroplane ever has been.

Concorde Crash: Days That Shocked The World conveyed little of that affection. The hour-long documentary opened with a brief history of the Anglo-French plane but got down to business within ten minutes, analysing the Air France Flight 4590 disaster in July 2000 at Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport that cost 113 lives.

This would have been acceptable if the analysis was thorough. Instead, the programme stuck rigidly to the official version, without even hinting at the compelling but unproven theories that the authorities refused to discuss. There's a fascinating story here, but this show covered only half of it.

What is not disputed is that, as the plane took off with 100 passengers and nine crew on board, sheets of flame roared from the two engines on the left wing. Unable to generate enough thrust to stay airborne, the Concorde dropped out of the sky, killing everyone on board and four people on the ground.

Many of the bereaved learned their loved ones were dead from news reports. They included Francine Quignon-Fleuret, daughter of the flight engineer Gilles Jardinaud, who held back tears as she described how proud her dad was to be a new grandfather. This was to be his final trip before retirement.

Looking at the photo that appeared on every newspaper front page around the world, of the plane ablaze with heat haze shimmering around its white delta wings, 'my heart aches and I cry,' she said.

Investigators explained how a piece of twisted titanium, discovered on the runway, supplied a clue to the cause. When one wheel ran over the metal, which had fallen off a DC10 minutes earlier, a tyre exploded with such force that the fuel tank was ruptured and was set alight by the heat of the engines.

What this account ignored was the discovery by British investigative journalist David Rose that Air France engineers, servicing the plane four days earlier, had failed to replace a vital component known as a spacer, which kept the wheels in alignment.

Without this part, the plane wobbled on the runway like a faulty supermarket trolley — something that was evident from the sooty tyre tracks along the tarmac.

The documentary showed these tracks but said nothing about them. Neither did it remark that the French president Jacques Chirac was in a jumbo jet on an adjacent taxiway, and that the flailing Concorde might easily have veered into it. Surely that was worth mentioning?