Originally Posted by
stilton
What happened to the Concorde at Dakar ?
The story has never been fully elucidated....
But in brief, F-BVFD made an extremely hard landing at Dakar in November 1977, with a vertical speed in the order of 14 ft/sec (with 10 ft/sec being the formal limit).
The result was a major tailstrike, ruining the tail wheel and some of the tail structure.
The aircraft was repaired, repatriated, and put back into service, but it was the first one to be withdrawn from service when the Paris-Dakar-Rio route was closed.
In the end it was scrapped in 1994... only a section of the forward fuselage still remains in the stores of the Air and Space Museum at Le Bourget (Paris).