Originally Posted by 1995hoo

The reason the second one is wrong is that "Concorde" is not a collective noun referring to all 20 aircraft. There are times when "a Concorde" or "the Concorde" can be correct. For example, one might say, "A Concorde and a Soviet Tu-144 may be seen on the roof of a museum in Sinsheim." It would be equally correct to say "Concorde and a Soviet Tu-144," but I'd probably use the "a" in the interest of parallelism in sentence structure. Anyway, in the case of the Paris crash, one (complete) Concorde crashed. It wasn't a fraction of a whole.