On October 24, 2003, British Airways flight BA002 touched down at London Heathrow for the last time. As it taxied in, the crew made an announcement: this was Concorde's final commercial flight. The passengers — who had each paid around £8,000 for a seat — stood and applauded. Some wept. The most beautiful commercial aircraft ever built had just made its last passenger flight, 27 years after entering service.

Concorde flew London to New York in three hours and thirty minutes. The subsonic journey takes seven hours. It cruised at 60,000 feet — high enough to see the curvature of the earth. It reached Mach 2.04, twice the speed of sound. Its passengers arrived in New York before they had, technically, left London, owing to the five-hour time difference. In 27 years of service, it never killed a passenger. It was, by almost any measure, the most extraordinary commercial aircraft ever to fly. And it was retired because the economics never worked, and because one catastrophic accident made the numbers impossible.

The Aircraft That Nations Built Together

Concorde was the product of an Anglo-French treaty signed in November 1962 — the only international aviation programme in history that was legally binding on both governments. The British Aircraft Corporation and Aérospatiale shared the work: the French built the fuselage and engine nacelles, the British the wings and systems. Even the name was contested: France insisted on the final "e" and Britain eventually acquiesced. The treaty had no withdrawal clause. Both governments were locked in, regardless of cost.

The cost was enormous. The original estimate was £70 million. The final development bill, in 1976 money, was over £1.3 billion — split equally between the two governments. Only 20 aircraft were ever built, of which 14 entered service: seven with British Airways and seven with Air France. The economics were impossible from the start. Pan American and TWA, which had ordered options early, cancelled them in 1973. The sonic boom over populated areas made overland supersonic flight politically impossible. Concorde was confined to oceanic routes — which meant, essentially, the North Atlantic.

What It Was Like to Fly It

Concorde's cabin was narrow — four seats across, two on each side of the aisle — and the windows were small, barely larger than a paperback book, to withstand the pressure differential at 60,000 feet. Passengers could feel the aircraft accelerating through Mach 1 as a faint shudder, and again through Mach 2. The cabin temperature was warm, the engine noise slightly higher than a subsonic jet.

The altitude was transformative. At 60,000 feet, the sky above was deep violet — almost the colour of space. The horizon was visibly curved. Below, the Atlantic was a dark blue expanse with no visible cloud. Experienced travellers described a sensation of being simultaneously very fast and very still — suspended above the world, watching it pass at 1,350 miles per hour while sitting in a leather seat drinking champagne.

The nose drooped on takeoff and landing — a distinctive design feature required because the aircraft's long, curved fuselage blocked the pilots' view of the runway when the nose was level. At cruise, it pointed straight ahead. Passengers sitting in the front rows could watch through a small window as the needle on the Machmeter in the forward bulkhead climbed past 1.0, 1.5, 2.0. Few experiences in commercial aviation have ever matched it.

Paris, July 2000

On July 25, 2000 — exactly 91 years after Blériot crossed the Channel — Air France flight 4590 struck a piece of metal on the runway at Charles de Gaulle Airport, ruptured a fuel tank, and caught fire shortly after takeoff. It crashed into a hotel near Gonesse two minutes later. All 109 people aboard and four on the ground were killed. It was Concorde's first fatal accident in 27 years and over 100,000 flights.

The fleet was grounded, modified, and returned to service in November 2001. But the accident, combined with the post-9/11 collapse in premium transatlantic travel, had broken the commercial case. Both airlines announced retirement in 2003. The last flights took place on October 24 — three aircraft landing at Heathrow within minutes of each other, to a crowd of tens of thousands who had gathered to watch.

Nothing has replaced Concorde. More than 20 years after its retirement, the fastest commercial flight available crosses the Atlantic in six and a half hours. Several companies are developing supersonic successors — Boom Supersonic's Overture, Aerion's AS2, and others — but none has yet entered service. The sky over the North Atlantic is, for the first time since 1976, a subsonic place. Concorde is gone. The curvature of the earth is only visible from private jets and military aircraft now. But for 27 years, anyone who could afford the ticket could sit back at 60,000 feet and watch the world curve away below them. Not many things in life offer that.

Sources: Jonathan Glancey, Concorde: The Rise and Fall of the Supersonic Airliner (2015); Wikipedia, "Concorde"; British Airways archive