There’s something about Concorde that people love.
It was incredibly loud, horrendously environmentally taxing, and expensive enough that most people could only imagine buying a ticket. Maintenance costs were reportedly high, which makes sense when you think about the fact that the aircraft would actually stretch approximately up to 10 inches during flights. The paint needed to be specially developed, to be able to counter-act the effects of supersonic flight, because as well as the stretching, there was also extreme heat generated while in the air.
Before being put into service, the fleet had already been setting records. As they were subjected to monumental amounts of testing, in the region of 5,000 hours, they became the most tested aircraft for passenger flight in history. Once deemed safe for commercial travel, the fleet was divided up between the French (Air France) and the British (British Airways, with parts and maintenance carried out by Airbus) to run routes across the world. This joint British Airways and Air France project peacefully lasted for 40 years, from the signing of the Anglo-French supersonic airliner treaty in 1962 to Concorde’s final commercial flight in 2003.
To this day, even more than a decade after it’s final flight, the campaign to bring back Concorde is alive and well. It’s been reported that Sir Richard Branson offered to buy the fleet from British Airways, to put them back in service, at the price of $1million per plane. Concorde could fly from London to New York in three and a half hours or less, more than half the length of a standard airliner flight at the time. The record for the fastest flight along that particular route for one of the Concorde fleet was 2 hours 53 minutes. That wasn’t the only impressive time – in November 1986, a BA Concorde flew around the world (covering 28,238 miles) in just under 30 hours.
Admittedly, Concorde is not as impressive technologically by today’s standards, but for an aircraft conceived in the 1960’s, they were undeniably revolutionary.
History @ Aber 