The Rise and Fall of the Concorde, the Plane That Cut Flight Times in Half

For 27 years, buying a plane ticket meant you could actually outrun the speed of sound. Then, in the span of about 90 seconds, that era started coming to an end.

For 27 years, the Concorde made it possible to cross the Atlantic in under four hours, at twice the speed of sound. Today, you will only find it in museums. Here’s why.

The Concorde was the world's first supersonic passenger plane, capable of reaching 1,354 miles per hour and cutting a London-to-New York flight down to about three hours.

Built jointly by manufacturers in France and Britain, it made its first milestone flight in 1969. By 1973, it traveled across the Atlantic for the first time and by 1976, it went commercial.

British Airways and Air France were the first airlines to run the early routes, and they eventually added Washington, D.C., and New York City by 1977.

The Concorde, which carried up to 100 passengers comfortably, catered to first-class travelers who valued the speed of the aircraft most, never mind that a round-trip ticket between New York and London cost about $7,574. But the steep fares also made it difficult to sell seats at full capacity. That became one problem facing the Concorde’s future.

Then there was the problem of noise. One Concorde takeoff measured 119.4 decibels, nearly as loud as a thunderclap, which pushed more cities to restrict its routes to ocean crossings only.

On July 25, 2000, Air France Flight 4590 was taking off from Paris, heading to New York with 100 passengers and nine crew members on board, when an unfortunate accident occurred. A strip of metal that had fallen off another plane’s engine just five minutes earlier struck the Concorde’s tire on the left landing gear.

The tire burst, sending pieces of it into the wing and tearing open a fuel tank. Fuel started leaking out, and it caught fire almost instantly. As the plane lifted off, it began drifting off the side of the runway.

Within seconds, one engine caught fire and had to be shut down. About a minute later, a second engine started failing too. The plane couldn't climb or keep up its speed. It stalled and crashed into a hotel about 90 seconds after it started its takeoff. All 109 people on the plane died, along with four people on the ground.

Due to mounting costs and the crash’s impact on public confidence, Air France and British Airways retired the entire Concorde fleet in 2003.

One aircraft, the F-BVFA, the first Air France Concorde to open service to Rio de Janeiro, Washington, and New York, was donated to the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum on June 12, 2003, the day of its final flight, after logging 17,824 flight hours in the air.

Air France had promised the museum that donation back in 1989, more than a decade before the plane's retirement was in the cards.

Today, the aircraft is permanently displayed at the museum's Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia.