This day in history...Concorde

"cazzyodo" (cazzyodo)
10/24/2013 at 10:38 • Filed to: Planelopnik, History

Here's a little "This day in history" post from my whiteboard today:

2003: The last commercial supersonic Concorde flight landed in London.

From British Airways !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! : " On 24 October 2003, British Airways withdrew Concorde, bringing to a close the world’s only supersonic passenger service. The final scheduled commercial flight was BA002 from JFK operated by G-BOAG. BA’s fleet of seven aircraft were subsequently dispersed for preservation at Barbados (AE), Edinburgh (AA), Filton (AF), Manchester (AC), New York (AD) and Seattle (AG) with one (AB) remaining at Heathrow."

Cruising altitude of 60,000+ feet, Mach 2 cruising speed, less than four hours from NY to London...pretty cool. Terrifying, but cool.

I say commercial because I believe other flights (two?) occurred after the 24th but those were for VIPs. This final one was for British Airways while Air France had the VIP flights.

But fear not! NASA and the Air Force !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! in an effort to make domestic super sonic flights less obnoxious (hat tip to the front page post however long ago).

DISCUSSION (4)

Bluecold > cazzyodo
10/24/2013 at 10:56

"Terrifying, but cool."

Terrifying? why? Concorde had an outstanding safety record.

cazzyodo > Bluecold
10/24/2013 at 11:03

Part of the reason they couldn't get enough passengers was the crash in 2000 (I think it was).

The other reasons were lower passenger count after 9/11 and the high maintenance cost.

Timing is everything and at the time, it was terrifying.

Bluecold > cazzyodo
10/24/2013 at 11:06

But how does that make the Concorde terrifying?

cazzyodo > Bluecold
10/24/2013 at 11:16

A Concorde crash and terrorist hijacking in general. That's not terrifying?

I won't be changing how I phrased it but throw in "At the time..." before the statement you have issues with then. Or shift your focus to the post as a whole.