Concorde Takes Flight for Final Time

[newyawker99]

I live near JFK and I just heard the last one go by around 15 minutes ago.

The Concorde, the skinny, needle-nosed 20th-century icon of international jet-setters for nearly three decades, took off Friday morning from John F. Kennedy International Airport on its final flight home to London.

"Everyone has enormous pride in all that she has achieved, but there is inevitable sadness that we have to move on and say farewell," British Airways chairman Lord Marshall said before Concorde's swan song. "The decision to retire Concorde was a tough one, but it is the right thing to do at the right time."

The Concorde, a joint project of the British and French governments, began commercial service in January 1976. The technological marvel and the ultimate symbol of jet-set glamour flew 11 miles above the Earth at up to 1,350 mph, crossing the Atlantic in about 3 1/2 hours. With the five-hour time difference, passengers arrived in New York earlier than they had left London.

The British and French hoped to sell hundreds, but in the end only 16 were built. They were used by British Airways and Air France.


bye bye Concorde

[yellowcanine]

1. And good riddance

This was a government sponsored boondoggle that thankfully we were able to avoid in the U.S. - in spite of Dick Nixon's efforts to get the U.S. to build it's own SST (super sonic transport) in the 70s to "compete" with the Brits and French. Turned out that the critics were right - it was an idea whose time hadn't come - commercially it just wasn't viable.