It still looks cool

I remember as a kid thinking that SSTs were the coolest things going, and being bitterly disappointed when the US backed out of efforts to build one — and that they weren’t much allowed to fly over US airspace, only over ocean. They were like something out of Thunderbirds, only real.

The combination of the crash in 2000, plus the general downturn in air travel and increasing maintenance costs, have led British Airways and Air France to announce the end of Concorde service this year.

Capable of speeds of up to 1,350mph, Concorde has been in passenger service since the first flight left London for Bahrain in January 1976. BA’s Concorde’s have carried 2.5 million passengers. In recent years both BA and Air France have concentrated their services on the transatlantic route to New York. The aircraft’s best transatlantic time was two hours 54 minutes from New York to London.

Three hours across the Atlantic. Wow.

Back in the 60s and 70s, we had flights to the moon, and super-sonic airline jets, and the development of the space shuttle. Maybe the era of big, flashy, fast aeronautical engineering projects like this is over. That would be a real shame.

(I’m sure that someone will make the point about the “breaking” of this historic Anglo-French effort, this “end” of “concorde” taking place in the current international context. Nah. It’s economics, that’s all.)

(via Ghost of a Flea)