Seconds before Air France flight AF-4590 rammed into a small hotel in Gonesse and engulfed it in flames, the pilot, Mr Christian Marty, veered the Concorde away from the town centre, the mayor and other residents claimed today.
"It is clear, according to witnesses, that at the last moment, when the plane was about to fly over the hospital and the town, the pilot directed the craft over the field," said Mayor Jean-Pierre Blazy.
Other residents also paid tribute to the pilot, who they said spared their small town of 23,000 people from a disaster even greater than that caused by yesterday's crash. "We avoided catastrophe thanks to the pilot's presence of mind," Mayor Blazy said.
The Rev Claude Porcheron, a local priest at the St Peter St Paul parish in Gonesse, also said he believed the pilot was a hero for his desperate, last-gasp effort to save lives.
Meanwhile, friends of the pilot said yesterday he was a devoted sportsman who was the first Frenchman to windsurf across the Atlantic "Christian Marty was a great sportsman, very sharp mentally and physically - he was at the highest level," fellow pilot Mr Eric Derivry told Reuters.
Not content with the adventure of flying jet planes for a living, Mr Marty windsurfed across the Atlantic 18 years ago and was a passionate mountain biker, Derivry said.
"During stopovers, he would take his bike with him and then we would see him leaving to climb mountains," he said.
Another fellow pilot, Mr Pierre-Jean Loisel, paid tribute to Mr Marty's great humility and professionalism and remembered his dead colleague's passion for sport.
"He always carried his bike with him - he was a sportsman at heart," he said.
Marty, who came from the south-eastern town of Saint-Larent du Var near the city of Nice, flew his first plane in August 1969.
He became a captain of an Airbus A340 and became an instructor for the plane before qualifying as a Concorde pilot last summer.