With one last roof-rattling boom, the Concorde made its final flight on October 24, 2003, less than three decades after its commercial debut. Today, most of the 20 joint British-French aircraft sit silently in museums or airports, but in its heyday, the aerospace marvel cracked the sound barrier daily, shuttling 100-odd passengers at a time from New York to London in only three hours and 45 minutes, almost half the time it took a Boeing 747 to fly the same route. The sun set on the supersonic era nearly 14 years ago, but as anyone fortunate enough to fly that high and that fast would tell you, the space-age wonder was about more than speed.
"The Concorde was fabulous. It was a fabulous aircraft," says Fred Finn, a retired business executive and holder of the Guinness Book of World Records' "World's Most Traveled Person" title. "The difference between it and a conventional aircraft is like a Rolls-Royce or Cadillac and a Lamborghini or a McLaren. You could feel it."
Finn would know as well as anyone, logging a reported 15 million miles in the air for his business dealings, and nearly 2.5 million of those miles in the same Concorde seat, 9A, during his record 718 trips aboard the supersonic jet. There he met the likes of Sir Paul McCartney, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Dolly Parton. Finn gladly regales any listener with Concorde yarns, like that of a Christmas Day flight with only three passengers. One took out his guitar and began to strum "Take Me Home, Country Roads." It was John Denver.
"I have a love affair with the Concorde that lasted longer than both of my ex-wives," Finn says. "It was a great part of my life."
The Concorde experience began at the airport, with its own check-in counter, then on to a lounge full of global upper-crusters. Each flight featured two red wines, two white wines, and two champagnes chosen for that flight's menu; for Finn, seat 9A always came with a complimentary half bottle of Dom Perignon. More importantly, the jet-lagless transatlantic crossing also gathered a community of passengers and crew who knew one another by name—fewer pilots have flown the Concorde than have ever been in space.
To think that a service beloved by world leaders, movie stars, and business moguls would ever disappear sounds surprising in 2017, when so much caters to the ultra-rich. But as Graham Boynton's 1998 special report in Condé Nast Traveler presaged, economics were always going to be the Concorde's undoing.
"The Concorde has been a spectacular failure precisely because the numerical absurdities have, from the beginning, overwhelmed the aesthetic niceties," Boynton wrote. "It cost British and French taxpayers more than two billion dollars to develop and produce. It uses 22 tons of fuel an hour—twice the consumption of a 747 carrying four times the number of passengers as well as a significant amount of cargo. It requires 22 hours of maintenance for every hour in the air, compared with eight hours for a 747 and six and a quarter for a 777. And according to a recent study, it costs $1,814 per seat to break even on the Concorde, as opposed to $357 on a 400-seat 747 and $390 on a 275-seat Airbus A340."
In 2017 dollars, those figures translate to a Concorde needing to make $2,721 per seat to break even, whereas the 747 would have to earn $536 per seat to break even. That doesn't even account for bigger and more efficient planes like the Airbus A380 or the Boeing 787 Dreamliner. While the appetite for transatlantic flights has grown to record levels, demand has skewed toward low-cost services offered by the likes of Norwegian Air Shuttle and Wow Air.
David Learmount, a consulting editor at FlightGlobal and former Royal Air Force pilot, explains that for all the Concorde's technological innovations, it only came into service because Europeans looked skyward and felt left behind.
"Russians had Sputnik at that time, Americans had the moon landing, and Europe said, 'What the f** are we gonna do?'” Learmount says.
Originally, the U.K. and France began separately developing their respective supersonic prototypes, the British Bristol Type 223 and the French Sud Aviation Super-Caravelle. Development costs for each ran so high that in 1962, at the behest of both countries' governments, the projects merged to jointly build the Concorde. Eventually, British Airways and Air France were the technology's only takers.
"It's very simple. It was an amazing technological achievement. It was given away to the airlines for operation, because they didn't want to buy it. They knew it wouldn't be commercial. In Air France's case, they never managed to make it commercial," Learmount says.
The Concorde raked in millions of pounds sterling for British Airways, but Air France's routes to and from Paris never proved profitable. Part of it was simple logistics: Government regulations barred the Concorde from going supersonic over land, and landlocked Paris required the Concorde to spend more air time at conventional speeds. But the City of Light also wasn't a financial hub of the same caliber as New York and London, and demand just wasn't the same.
Boynton's 1998 article foresaw the end of the Concorde by 2015, but two cataclysmic events unspooled the plane's already loosely wound economics: The crash of Air France Flight 4590 shortly after takeoff, which killed all 113 people on board, and the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, which left the airline industry irreparably changed.
Rather than continuing to hemorrhage money on a high-maintenance, low-profit aircraft, British Airways and Air France grounded the Concorde for good a dozen years sooner. Today, no heir to supersonic commercial flight appears imminent, and Learmount sees only two scenarios in which that will happen: Either a small, private jet appeals to the mega-rich as a prestige toy, or technological advances allow a supersonic plane to fly transpacific routes longer than the Concorde's roughly 4,500-mile range.
"If you could fly from L.A. to London, that would be something, wouldn't it," Learmount says. "You really would pay for that. You'd say, 'F** the sleeper seats, I'm going for a four-and-a-half-hour trip.'"
Startups like Boom and members of the Concorde Group are hoping to make supersonic travel a reality again some day soon. Airbus even has a patent for the Concorde-2, a smaller "rocket" that could carry a couple dozen passengers at 4.5 times the speed of sound. But until anyone finds a way to make it financially viable, the Concorde and all its trappings will remain nothing more than a museum relic, and a memory of the good life.