It cost $12,000 for a one way ticket to ride one of the hundred seats on this Air France Concorde SuperSonic Transport (SST) for a three hour flight across the Atlantic at twice the speed of sound. Way up at 60,000 feet where it flew, the passengers could see the horizon curve. I was surprised to see the passenger windows were about the size of postcards. Tiny little things.

The first Concorde flew back in 1969 while America was landing on the moon. The French and British saw the Concorde as a sort of Apollo Program Lite, showing that they were just as technologically advanced as those damned Americans. Pan Am was the first to order six Concordes, or actually the rights to buy them, at the same time it was taking reservations for passenger flights to the moon. That inspired other airlines to place their orders too.

A total of 120 Concordes were planned to be built until Pan Am sobered up and backed out and all the other airlines chickened out too. That left the state-owned airlines of England and France, who had no choice but to fly them. A total of sixteen were built, two prototypes, seven for British Airways and seven for Air France. The Concorde never made money for France but made a billion pounds profit for the Brits in the 1980s under careful management.

They had one hell of a time getting landing rights in New York where the loony ecology movement warned that the Concorde would tear up the atmosphere, depleting the ozone, and cause massive increases in skin cancer. Of course, nothing of the kind happenned and the ecologists became environmentalists warning us about global warning.

The Concorde took a heavy blow to its reputation when one crashed on takeoff from Paris in 2002, killing 113 people and grounding the fleet for a year. The Concorde fleet was 27 years old. Aircraft usually are built to last twenty years after which maintenance costs start ratcheting up. The Concordes stopped flying in 2003, too expensive to fly.