Concorde: The Supersonic Airliner That Flew Faster Than the Earth Turned

For most of aviation history, going faster has meant going forward. Concorde, the Anglo-French supersonic airliner that entered service in 1976, briefly made it possible to go faster than the sun appeared to move — a westbound crossing could land at a local time earlier than it departed. Cruising at Mach 2, about 1,350 mph, at 60,000 feet, it crossed the Atlantic in under three and a half hours, roughly half the time of a conventional jet. The engineering was extraordinary. A slender delta wing, four afterburning turbojets, and a drooping nose that lowered for visibility on takeoff and landing made it unmistakable. At Mach 2 the airframe heated and stretched several inches in flight. Passengers in its narrow cabin paid premium fares to fly at the edge of space, the curvature of the Earth visible through small windows. But Concorde fought economics it could never win. It burned enormous quantities of fuel, carried only about 100 passengers, and its sonic boom led many countries to ban supersonic flight over land — confining it largely to ocean routes and shrinking its market. Only twenty were ever built. A catastrophic crash near Paris in 2000, followed by the aviation downturn after September 2001 and rising maintenance costs, sealed its fate; the fleet was retired in 2003. Concorde remains a paradox: a commercial failure that was also one of aviation's greatest technical achievements, and a standing challenge to today's engineers, several of whom are again chasing the dream of a supersonic airliner that can finally make the economics work.