On 26 November 2003, exactly 17 years ago, he landed at Bristol airport the last of the Concordes. With their unmistakable shape, supersonic airliners have been a symbol of an era, an emblem of technological progress but also of hedonism. A total of 20 examples were built, of which however only 14 were actually used for commercial flights: half under the insignia of Air France and half under those of the British Airways. In fact, these aircraft were produced by an Anglo-French consortium formed by the companies British Aerospace and Aérospatiale. The very high cost of tickets (about three times those of the first class of normal lines) soon made the Concorde an aircraft for the exclusive use of VIPs. A true status symbol, in fact.
The first flight of the prototype dates back to March 2, 1969, while on November 4, 1970 the sound barrier was broken for the first time. Trade voyages only began on January 21, 1976 on the Paris-Dakar-Rio de Janeiro lines e London-Bahrain. The first sections were opened in November of the following year towards New York, the most iconic.
The Concorde was headed right to the Big Apple on 25 July 2000 it crashed in Gonesse, close to Paris-Le Bourget airport. It was a massacre: all 100 passengers, the nine crew members (3 pilots and 6 flight attendants) and four people who were on the ground died.
The disaster caused a stir and was one of the reasons that led to the retirement of the supersonic aircraft. Even without that episode, however, Concorde's fate would almost certainly have been sealed by the enormous costs for fuel and maintenance. A feature that led these aircraft to be classified as "white elephants”, an expression used in France and in the Anglo-Saxon countries to indicate all the goods whose construction and management costs are not compensated by the benefits they provide.
