2.04MACH
Cruise speed
60,000FT
Cruise altitude
2:52:59
Fastest Atlantic crossing

1976 — 2003 · The only supersonic airliner

Twice the speedof sound.Once in history.

For twenty-seven years a white delta crossed the Atlantic in under three and a half hours, at the edge of space, faster than the sun moves across the sky. This is how it was built, why it was first, and why it had to come down.

Begin the climb Full timeline

2.04MACH
Cruise speed
60,000FT
Cruise altitude
2:52:59
Fastest Atlantic crossing

Altitude

0 FT

MACH 0.30

01 / TAKE-OFF

A dream signed
in two languages

In 1956 a British committee asked whether an airliner could cruise at twice the speed of sound. Six years later two governments signed a treaty to build one. It was meant to cost £70 million. It cost more than £1.5 billion.

The Supersonic Transport Aircraft Committee first met on 1 October 1956. By 1959 it had settled on a slender delta for Mach 2. Neither Britain nor France could afford to build it alone.

On 29 November 1962 the two governments signed an international treaty rather than a commercial contract. It had no exit clause. The British Aircraft Corporation and Sud Aviation shared the airframe; Rolls-Royce and Snecma shared the engine.

Twenty airframes were built, six for development and fourteen for passengers. The name was settled in December 1967, when Tony Benn kept the French spelling: e for excellence, England, Europe and entente.

Estimate, 1962

£70 M

Final bill, 1976 money

£1.5 bn+

Overrun

×20

Partners

Airframe: BAC · Sud Aviation
Engine: Rolls-Royce · Snecma
Airframes built: 206 development, 14 production

02 / ENGINEERING

Anatomy of a
supersonic airliner

Nothing on Concorde was borrowed. The wing, the engines, the nose, even the way it carried fuel were answers to a single question: how do you keep a hundred people comfortable at Mach 2 for three hours.

01—07

Ogival delta wing

No flaps. No slats.

The slender ogee delta makes lift two ways: conventionally at speed, and from vortices that roll over the leading edge at high angles of attack. That is how it landed nose-high with no high-lift devices at all.

Olympus 593

4 × 38,000 lbf

Four Rolls-Royce/Snecma turbojets — the only turbojets with reheat ever to power a commercial aircraft. Reheat lit for take-off and again to push through Mach 1, then shut down for the cruise.

Variable intakes

63% of thrust

Moving ramps slowed the air from Mach 2 to about half the speed of sound before it reached the compressor. At cruise the intakes produced 63 per cent of the thrust, the nozzles 29, the engines themselves 8. The first full-authority digital control on a passenger aircraft ran them.

Droop nose

5° · 12.5°

A long pointed nose hides the runway on approach, so it hinged down: 5° for taxi and take-off, 12.5° for landing. A glazed visor rose to streamline it again at Mach 2.

Fuel as ballast

20 t pumped aft

Lift moves rearward as an aircraft goes supersonic. Rather than fight it with drag, Concorde pumped around 20 tonnes of fuel aft through the transonic range, shifting its centre of gravity about 1.8 m.

RR58 skin

127 °C · +300 mm

Friction heated the nose to 127 °C, the limit for the Hiduminium alloy. The airframe stretched by up to 300 mm in cruise. On the flight deck, a gap opened beside the engineer's console and closed again on descent.

Fly-by-wire

First on an airliner

Pilot inputs were carried to the powered controls as electrical signals, with mechanical back-up. No passenger aircraft had flown that way before.

Specification · production aircraft

02 / SPEC

Length61.66 m

Wingspan25.6 m

Height12.2 m

Max take-off weight185,070 kg

Fuel capacity119,600 L

Range7,222 km

CruiseMach 2.04

Ceiling60,000 ft

Engines4 × Olympus 593 · 38,000 lbf

03 / FIRST FLIGHTS

Two nations,
two first flights

Thirty-eight days apart, the French and British prototypes took to the air. Seven years of testing later, two airliners pushed back at the same minute in London and Paris.

01 / 05

2 MAR 1969

Toulouse

F-WTSS · 001André Turcat

Prototype 001 lifts off from Toulouse-Blagnac with André Turcat in command — the first Concorde to fly, just over six years after the treaty that created it.

Source ↗

02 / 05

9 APR 1969

Filton

G-BSST · 002Brian Trubshaw

Thirty-eight days later the British prototype follows, flown by Brian Trubshaw from Filton to RAF Fairford, where the UK flight-test programme would be based.

Source ↗

03 / 05

1 OCT 1969

Supersonic

F-WTSS · 001Mach 1

Seven months after its maiden flight, 001 pushes through the sound barrier for the first time. Mach 2 would follow in November 1970.

Source ↗

04 / 05

21 JAN 1976

London & Paris

G-BOAA · F-BVFA11:40

Scheduled service begins with a choreographed tie: BA300 to Bahrain and AF025 to Rio de Janeiro via Dakar push back at the same minute, 11:40, in London and Paris.

British Airways · Heathrow

Air France · Charles de Gaulle

Source ↗

05 / 05

22 NOV 1977

New York

JFKBan lifted 17 Oct 1977

After a long fight over noise, the Port Authority's ban on Concorde falls on 17 October 1977. Five weeks later the route it was built for — London and Paris to New York — opens.

Source ↗

04 / ARCHIVE

The real
thing

Photographs of the aircraft, from its first flight in 1969 to the last landing in 2003 — and the airframes that remain.

04 / FASTER THAN THE SUN

Twice as high,
twice the speed of sound

Concorde cruised at Mach 2.04 — 2,179 km/h — at 60,000 feet, twice the altitude of other airliners. Westbound, it outran the sun: leave London after breakfast, land in New York before it.

The view from 60,000 ft

Twenty-three miles a minute. Up here, above 96% of the atmosphere, the sky through the small windows turned violet and the horizon bent visibly into the curvature of the Earth.

Speed race

Nothing carrying passengers has come close since.

Concorde

Mach 2.04 cruise

2,179 km/h

Speed of sound

Mach 1 · sea level

1,235 km/h

Boeing 747

Mach 0.85 cruise

900 km/h

Shinkansen

Line speed limit

320 km/h

Arrive before you leave

Land seventy minutes
before you took off.

Depart · London Heathrow

10:30

GMT

Arrive · New York JFK

09:20

EST · same day

Block time London → New York was about 3 h 30 min; New York’s clocks run five hours behind London’s. Depart 10:30 GMT, arrive 09:20 local — a net gain of 1 h 10 min on the watch. The subsonic 747 took roughly eight hours.

Source ↗Source ↗

Reheat on · over the Atlantic

MACH 1.00

Concorde went supersonic only over water. Westbound out of Heathrow the reheats were lit past waypoint UPGAS, and the boom rolled back over the Cornish coast.

Twenty-seven years in numbers

2,500,000+

Passengers

British Airways, 1976–2003

Source ↗

50,000

Flights

British Airways fleet total

Source ↗

1,000,000+

Bottles of champagne

Poured in the cabin

Source ↗

718

Flights by Fred Finn

Always seat 9A

Source ↗

2:52:59

Fastest crossing

New York → London, 7 Feb 1996, G-BOAD

Source ↗

127 °C

Nose temperature

Kinetic heating at Mach 2

Source ↗

06 / THE NETWORK

Where
it flew

Two cities in Europe, a handful in the Americas and the Gulf — and, twice, all the way round.

21 Jan 1976

London–Bahrain · Paris–Dakar–Rio

The first two scheduled services pushed back at the same minute, 11:40, one from each capital.

SOURCE ↗

24 May 1976

Washington Dulles

The first North American destination. British Airways and Air France touched down within a minute of each other.

SOURCE ↗

22 Nov 1977

New York JFK

The route that defined it: about three and a half hours, up to twice a day, for twenty-six years.

SOURCE ↗

15–16 Aug 1995

Round the world

Air France, eastbound from New York via Toulouse, Dubai, Bangkok, Guam, Honolulu and Acapulco: 31 h 27 m 49 s.

SOURCE ↗

05 / WHY IT STAYED THE ONLY ONE

Twenty-seven years.
Never replaced.

Concorde carried passengers from January 1976 to October 2003 and no airliner has flown as fast since. It was not for want of rivals — the one that beat it into the air lasted seven months in service.

LedgerTupolev Tu-144Concorde

First flight

Tu-14431 Dec 1968

Concorde2 Mar 1969

Passenger flightsBritish Airways alone

Tu-14455

Concorde~50,000

Passenger serviceNov 1977 – Jun 1978 vs 1976 – 2003

Tu-1447 months

Concorde27 years

Recorded failures

Tu-144226+ in 102 flights

Concorde—

Fatal crashes

Tu-1442

Concorde1

Tu-144 figures: Wikipedia

27 April 1973 · 14 CFR 91.817

The sky closed over America.

The United States banned civil supersonic flight over land. No Mach 1 over American soil meant no coast-to-coast market — and without it, nobody could make the numbers work on a second generation.

eCFR § 91.817 — Civil aircraft sonic boom

Successors · 2025 —

[1] · [2] · [3] · [4] · [5]

BOOM XB-1 — SUPERSONIC 28 JAN 2025
NASA X-59 — FIRST FLIGHT 28 OCT 2025
X-59 — SUPERSONIC 5 JUN 2026
FAA — OVERLAND BAN PROPOSED LIFTED 2 JUL 2026
BOOM OVERTURE — FIRST FLIGHT NOT BEFORE 2027

Half a century on, the question is no longer whether an airliner can fly at Mach 2 — it is whether anyone is allowed to hear it.

06 / WHY IT HAD TO COME DOWN

Why it had
to come down

For twenty-four years Concorde flew without losing a single passenger. Then one afternoon outside Paris, that ended.

25 July 2000 · Air France 4590 · F-BTSC · Gonesse, France

113

lives — one hundred passengers, nine crew, and four people on the ground.

BEA findings via Wikipedia

The chain of events

01
A strip of titanium on the runway
A 435 mm wear strip had fallen from a Continental Airlines DC-10 that departed minutes earlier.
02
A tyre bursts at take-off speed
Concorde ran over the strip at roughly 185 mph. The left main-gear tyre was cut and failed.
03
4.5 kg of rubber hits the wing
A fragment struck the underside of the wing at around 140 m/s — not a puncture, but a pressure shock through the full fuel tank.
04
Tank 5 ruptures
Fuel streamed out, ignited, and the aircraft could neither climb away nor return. It came down on a hotel in Gonesse within two minutes of take-off.

Grounded

August 2000 – November 2001

Back in service

7 November 2001

Fifteen months on the ground, and two fixes.

Kevlar-aramid liners

fitted inside the fuel tanks so a shock could no longer split them

Michelin NZG tyres

near-zero-growth radials that shed far smaller pieces if they fail

Heritage Concorde — CAA and DGAC modifications, 2001

10 April 2003

British Airways and Air France announced the end on the same day.

Airbus withdrew support

The manufacturer would no longer keep supplying the parts and engineering that kept the type certified.

Premium travel collapsed

After 11 September 2001 the transatlantic business traffic that filled the cabin never came back.

Maintenance costs rose

An ageing, one-of-a-kind fleet cost more every year to keep airworthy.

Heritage Concorde — retirement, 2003

24 October 2003 · London Heathrow

Three came home, one after another.

01
G-BOAE
Round trip from Edinburgh
Landed 1st
02
G-BOAF
Supersonic loop over the Bay of Biscay
Landed 2nd
03
G-BOAG
Last commercial service, Captain Mike Bannister
Landed 3rd · 16:05

CNN, 24 October 2003

26 November 2003 · G-BOAF · Heathrow → Filton

One hour and thirty minutes from Heathrow to Filton, where it was built. Twenty thousand people watched. It was the last Concorde flight there will ever be.

Concorde operational history

07 / WHERE THEY ARE NOW

Twenty built.
Eighteen survive.

Only one was lost in service and one was broken up for spares. The rest went to museums on both sides of the Atlantic — and one to the island it flew to most.

Built

Survive

On display

The survivors · registration, airframe number, flying hours

18 of 18 airframes

G-BOAF
No. 216
Aerospace Bristol
Filton, UK
18,257 h
The last Concorde to fly. 5,639 supersonic cycles.
G-BOAD
No. 210
Intrepid Museum
New York, USA
23,397 h
Most hours of any Concorde. Arrived by barge up the Hudson.
F-BVFA
No. 205
Udvar-Hazy Center
Chantilly, VA, USA
17,824 h
Flew Air France's first commercial service, 21 January 1976.
F-BTSD
No. 213
Musée de l'Air et de l'Espace
Le Bourget, France
12,974 h
Holds the westbound round-the-world record.
F-WTSS
No. 001
Musée de l'Air et de l'Espace
Le Bourget, France
— h
Prototype 001 — the first Concorde to fly, 2 March 1969.
G-BOAC
No. 204
Manchester Airport
Manchester, UK
22,260 h
The British Airways flagship.
G-BOAB
No. 208
Heathrow Airport
London, UK
22,296 h
Not on display
Stored airside at Heathrow; not open to the public.
G-BOAE
No. 212
Grantley Adams International Airport
Christ Church, Barbados
23,376 h
Flew the Edinburgh round trip on the final day, 24 October 2003.
G-BOAA
No. 206
National Museum of Flight
East Fortune, UK
22,768 h
Flew British Airways' first commercial service, 21 January 1976.
G-AXDN
No. 101
IWM Duxford
Duxford, UK
632 h
The fastest Concorde ever: Mach 2.23, 26 March 1974.
G-BBDG
No. 202
Brooklands Museum
Weybridge, UK
1,282 h
Pre-production airframe, restored at Brooklands.
F-BVFB
No. 207
Technik Museum Sinsheim
Sinsheim, Germany
14,771 h
Displayed beside a Tupolev Tu-144 — the only place you can see both.
F-WTSB
No. 201
Aeroscopia
Toulouse, France
909 h
First production-standard airframe.
F-BVFC
No. 209
Aeroscopia
Toulouse, France
14,332 h
Flew Air France's last ever Concorde flight, 27 June 2003.
G-BOAG
No. 214
Museum of Flight
Seattle, USA
16,239 h
Flew the last commercial service, JFK to Heathrow, 24 October 2003.
G-BSST
No. 002
Fleet Air Arm Museum
Yeovilton, UK
— h
British prototype 002 — first flew from Filton, 9 April 1969.
F-WTSA
No. 102
Musée Delta
Orly, France
— h
Pre-production airframe 102.
F-BVFF
No. 215
Charles de Gaulle Airport
Paris, France
— h
Not on display
Kept at Charles de Gaulle; not open to the public.

Hours and locations: List of Concorde aircraft

The cap in the gap

At Mach 2 the skin ran to 127 °C and the fuselage grew by up to 300 mm. On the flight deck it showed as a gap opening between the flight engineer's console and the rear bulkhead. On the last supersonic flights the engineers slid their caps into it, and as the airframe cooled it closed on them.

Trevor Norcott did so aboard G-BOAG in 2003. His cap is still there.

Mach: 0.30
Stretch: 0 mm
Skin: 20 °C

Press and hold. The fuselage warms, stretches, and a gap opens.

Source · Wikipedia

It left more than airframes behind.

13 July 1985

Two continents, one day

Phil Collins played Live Aid at Wembley, boarded Concorde, and played Philadelphia the same evening.

Source

1977 – 2003

The Queen's aircraft of choice

Queen Elizabeth II flew Concorde repeatedly across twenty-six years, beginning with the flight home from her Silver Jubilee tour.

Source

BA001 – BA004

Speedbird Concorde One

Air traffic control gave it a callsign of its own, so controllers would know at once what was climbing through their sector.

Source

08 / 1954 — 2026

Every date
that mattered

From a research study at Farnborough to the successors now flying: twenty-seven years in service, and the long before and after, on one rail.

Year1954

Year

1954

19542026

1954
A study at Farnborough
The Royal Aircraft Establishment begins looking seriously at a supersonic transport aircraft.
Source ↗
19561 Oct
STAC is formed
Britain sets up the Supersonic Transport Aircraft Committee to decide whether an airliner could fly faster than sound — and pay for itself.
Source ↗
1959
The STAC report
The committee recommends two designs, one of them a slender-delta Mach 2 transatlantic airliner. The shape of Concorde is on paper.
Source ↗
196229 Nov
Two nations sign
Britain and France sign an international treaty — not a contract — to build the aircraft together, sharing cost and work equally. Neither can walk away.
Source ↗
1965
Metal is cut
Construction of the two prototypes begins, 001 in Toulouse and 002 at Filton near Bristol.
Source ↗
1967
Concorde, with an e
Tony Benn settles the spelling: the French form, with an “e” for excellence, England, Europe and entente cordiale.
Source ↗
196831 Dec
The Tu-144 flies first
The Soviet Tupolev Tu-144 beats Concorde into the air by two months. It will never match its service record.
Source ↗
19692 Mar
001 lifts off at Toulouse
Prototype F-WTSS flies for the first time from Toulouse with André Turcat at the controls.
Source ↗
19699 Apr
002 flies from Filton
The British prototype G-BSST follows five weeks later, Brian Trubshaw in command.
Source ↗
19691 Oct
Supersonic
Concorde 001 passes Mach 1 for the first time.
Source ↗
1970Nov
Mach 2
The prototype reaches twice the speed of sound — the cruise it was designed for.
Source ↗
19714 Sep
Across the Atlantic
001 makes Concorde’s first transatlantic crossing.
Source ↗
197117 Dec
Pre-production 101
G-AXDN, the first pre-production aircraft, flies from Filton. It will become the fastest Concorde of all.
Source ↗
197327 Apr
America closes its skies
The United States bans civil supersonic flight over land (14 CFR 91.817). Concorde’s market shrinks to the oceans.
Source ↗
19733 Jun
Tu-144 crashes at Paris
The Soviet rival breaks up in front of the crowd at the Paris Air Show. Concorde flies the same afternoon.
Source ↗
197426 Mar
Mach 2.23
G-AXDN sets the highest speed any Concorde will ever record — about 2,370 km/h.
Source ↗
197621 Jan
Into service, together
At 11:40 BA300 (G-BOAA, London–Bahrain) and AF025 (F-BVFA, Paris–Rio via Dakar) push back at the same moment. Supersonic travel is open for business.
Source ↗
197624 May
Washington Dulles
British Airways and Air France land in the United States for the first time, side by side at Dulles.
Source ↗
197722 Nov
New York at last
After the ban is lifted on 17 October, Concorde begins scheduled service to JFK — the route it was built for.
Source ↗
1978
The rival retires
Tu-144 passenger service ends after 55 flights. Braniff agrees to fly Concordes subsonically between Dallas and Washington from the following January.
Source ↗
198513 Jul
Live Aid, twice
Phil Collins plays Wembley, boards Concorde and plays Philadelphia the same evening.
Source ↗
198524 Dec
Four in formation
Four British Airways Concordes fly in formation — a sight never repeated.
Source ↗
1992
Westbound around the world
An Air France Concorde circles the globe westbound from Lisbon, setting a circumnavigation record.
Source ↗
199515–16 Aug
Around the world in 31 h 27 m 49 s
An Air France Concorde sets the fastest circumnavigation of the world by a passenger aircraft.
Source ↗
19967 Feb
New York to London in 2 h 52 m 59 s
G-BOAD sets the fastest-ever Atlantic crossing by a passenger aircraft. The record still stands.
Source ↗
200025 Jul
Gonesse
Air France 4590, F-BTSC, runs over a titanium strip on take-off at Charles de Gaulle; a burst tyre ruptures a fuel tank. All 109 aboard and 4 on the ground die.
Source ↗
20017 Nov
Return to service
After fifteen months grounded, with Kevlar-lined tanks and Michelin NZG tyres certified on 5 September, Concorde flies passengers again.
Source ↗
2002
The BEA final report
France’s accident bureau publishes its findings on Flight 4590: a 435 mm wear strip shed by a preceding DC-10 cut the tyre.
Source ↗
200310 Apr
Retirement announced
British Airways and Air France announce the end together: Airbus is withdrawing support, premium traffic has slumped since 9/11, maintenance costs keep climbing.
Source ↗
200331 May
Air France bows out
AF001 from New York is Air France’s last commercial Concorde flight.
Source ↗
200324 Oct
Three land at Heathrow
G-BOAE from Edinburgh, G-BOAF from a Bay of Biscay loop and G-BOAG from New York land in sequence. British Airways’ last commercial day.
Source ↗
200326 Nov
The last flight
G-BOAF flies from Heathrow to Filton, where it was built, and shuts down for good. More than 20,000 people watch.
Source ↗
202528 Jan
XB-1 goes supersonic
Boom’s XB-1 demonstrator breaks the sound barrier — the first civil jet to do so since Concorde.
Source ↗
202528 Oct
X-59 flies
NASA’s quiet-supersonic X-59 makes its first flight, built to turn the boom into a thump.
Source ↗
20265 Jun
X-59 passes Mach 1
The X-59 flies supersonic for the first time.
Source ↗
20262 Jul
A door reopens
The FAA proposes lifting the 1973 ban on overland supersonic flight. Concorde never got to use it.
Source ↗

Twice the speedof sound.Once in history.

Toulouse

Filton

Supersonic

London & Paris

New York

Nothing carrying passengers has come close since.

Land seventy minutesbefore you took off.

The sky closed over America.

A strip of titanium on the runway

A tyre bursts at take-off speed

4.5 kg of rubber hits the wing

Tank 5 ruptures

Fifteen months on the ground, and two fixes.

British Airways and Air France announced the end on the same day.

Three came home, one after another.

It left more than airframes behind.

Two continents, one day

The Queen's aircraft of choice

Speedbird Concorde One

A study at Farnborough

STAC is formed

The STAC report

Two nations sign

Metal is cut

Concorde, with an e

The Tu-144 flies first

001 lifts off at Toulouse

002 flies from Filton

Supersonic

Mach 2

Across the Atlantic

Pre-production 101

America closes its skies

Tu-144 crashes at Paris

Mach 2.23

Into service, together

Washington Dulles

New York at last

The rival retires

Live Aid, twice

Four in formation

Westbound around the world

Around the world in 31 h 27 m 49 s

New York to London in 2 h 52 m 59 s

Gonesse

Return to service

The BEA final report

Retirement announced

Air France bows out

Three land at Heathrow

The last flight

XB-1 goes supersonic

X-59 flies

X-59 passes Mach 1

A door reopens

Land seventy minutes
before you took off.