On This Day: Passenger jet crashes at Paris airport and kills 130 people

JUNE 3, 1962: A passenger jet crashed on take-off in Paris and killed 130 people in what was then the deadliest single aircraft disaster, on this day in 1962.

The Atlanta-bound Air France Boeing 707, which had 132 people on board, burst into flames when it overran the runway at Orly Airport after failing to lift off.

Captain Roland Hoche had slammed on the wheel breaks and reverse thrusters in a late bid to abort take-off after only the nose barely lifted due to an unknown fault.

But with less than 3,000ft of runway remaining and with the jet thundering along at 200mph, there was not enough space to safely stop.

Its left wing dipped and hit the ground and it rolled 150 off the end of the runway before crashing into an empty house and exploding.

The twisted and burned out wreckage of Flight 007 was shown in British Pathé footage.  

The only part of the plane that remained intact was the tail section, which is where the two survivors – both flight attendants sitting in the rear of the cabin - were found.

Firefighters were unable to reach passengers for 90 minutes due to the intense heat caused by a full tank of burning jet fuel.

The death toll – the first time more than 100 people had been killed on board a single plane - left the world deeply shocked.

Most of the victims were American, including 106 predominantly wealthy art patrons who had just finished a month-long tour of Europe’s art treasures.

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This group, sponsored by the Atlanta Art Association, included many of the city’s civic, cultural and business leaders.

The recently elected Atlanta mayor Ivan Allen Jr immediately flew to Paris to help identify and repatriate many of the victims.

‘These were my lifelong friends,’ he later wrote. ‘This was my generation.

‘This was also the backbone of Atlanta’s cultural society, the city’s leading patrons of the arts. There was no precedent for this kind of agony.’

President John F Kennedy sent a message of sympathy to the Atlanta Art Association and victims’ families.

But not everyone was saddened by the deaths.

Malcolm X, a Nation of Islam black activist angry over segregation in the city during the height of the civil rights struggle, expressed his joy in a deeply sinister way.

‘I would like to announce a very beautiful thing that has happened.

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‘I got a wire from God today... well, all right, somebody came and told me that he really had answered our prayers over in France.

‘He dropped an airplane out of the sky with over 120 white people on it because the Muslims believe in an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.

‘But thanks to God, or Jehovah, or Allah, we will continue to pray, and we hope that every day another plane falls out of the sky.’

Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr, an Atlanta resident, cancelled a sit-in he had planned in the city in which Mayor Allen later promoted desegregation.

Allen went on to become the only politician from a major city in the Deep South to call for the federal government to introduce strict racial equality laws.

While the Flight 007 tragedy was the deadliest single airline crash, it was not the worst airline disaster at that time.

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Two years earlier 128 people on two planes and six on the ground were killed when the airliners collided over New York.

The deadliest crash in aviation history was the 1977 Tenerife disaster when 583 people died when a Boeing 747 hit another jet on the island’s runway.