The last flight of the Concorde was October 24, 2003. Believe it or not, there is a generation out there that doesn’t even know what Concorde was about. I was born in a time that promised the future of flight and we had it at Mach 2.04 – New York to London in 3.5 hours. Coming back home on the London to New York route you could arrive in the Big Apple two hours before you left London…think about that.
Today that flight takes 6.5+ hours. The future was more than 12 years ago.
The Concorde was an engineering marvel but wasn’t without problems. It flew so high (60,000 feet) there were concerns about radiation exposure, it flew so fast it had heating concerns, it devoured fuel, and the terrible crash in July 2000 at Gonesse, France eventually took it out of service.
I saw a Concorde take off from Heathrow and it sounded like two F-15s at afterburner at the same time.
I’ve linked some videos to show how awesome the Concorde was.