The 100 passengers who boarded Air France flight 4590 from Paris Charles de Gaulle to New York JFK on the afternoon of 25 July 2000 believed they were in for the trip of a lifetime. The German cruise line Peter Deillmann had chartered Concorde for a supersonic start to a cruise holiday from New York to Ecuador.
While they sipped champagne and waited for departure, three miles west of the airport in the village of Gonesse, the staff of a budget hotel – the Hotelissimo Les Relais Bleus – were at work as normal.
