Concorde Crossed the Atlantic in 3.5 Hours and Killed Itself With a 0.4-Meter Strip of Metal

The Anglo-French Concorde was the only supersonic airliner ever to enter sustained commercial service. The first prototype flew on March 2, 1969, from Toulouse with the test pilot André Turcat at the controls. By the time it entered service in 1976, market forecasts that had once predicted 350 sales had collapsed; the U.S. and most of Europe had banned supersonic overflight for noise reasons, and operators outside Britain and France quietly cancelled their orders. Only 20 airframes were ever built. British Airways and Air France each took seven into commercial service.

What the seven could do was extraordinary. Concorde cruised at Mach 2.02, slightly above Mach 2, at altitudes around 60,000 feet. The London–New York hop took 3 hours and 30 minutes; New York to London, with the prevailing winds, was sometimes done in under three. Passengers could fly westbound across the Atlantic and arrive at local time earlier than they had departed. The cabin was tiny — roughly 100 seats, four-abreast, with single-pane windows the size of a paperback. Tickets were prohibitively expensive and the flights mostly carried business travellers, ambassadors, and a thin slice of celebrity tourism.

The accident that ended the program was nearly comical in its mechanical pettiness. On July 25, 2000, Air France Flight 4590 ran over a 16-inch (about 0.4-meter) titanium strip on the runway at Charles de Gaulle that had fallen off a Continental Airlines DC-10 a few minutes earlier. The strip cut into a Concorde tire; debris from the bursting tire ruptured a fuel tank; the resulting fire shut down two of the four engines on takeoff. The aircraft crashed into a hotel in Gonesse, killing all 109 people on board and four on the ground. Concorde flew commercially for three more years and was retired by both airlines in 2003.