Concorde - The Greatest Plane Ever Built?

Thousands have flown on Concorde over the years. It is still one of the great machines of all time and perhaps the greatest plane ever built. It is certainly the only way the general public can travel faster than sound. Unfortunately, they will never be able to do it again – probably not in my lifetime at least. A trip to Australia from London takes 23 hours with a single refuelling stop. If the same trip was done supersonically it would take perhaps 12 hours, but there would still be need to be at

Credit to Newscast An Image of Concorde in all her glory. When will we see her like again?

least one stop. One thing is for sure, in the future there will be more and more people wanting to travel long distances at cost effective prices. Until someone designs a supersonic plane that will be cheap to develop and cheap to run, then supersonic long haul flights will be off limits.

Concorde was a product of the post war, cold war era: a sort of child of the 60’s. Like the space race, Concorde was a grand vision, a unique project the likes of which we rarely see now. If the British and French governments had continued to develop supersonic technologies then today we might have an affordable mode of supersonic transport. But now with over 3 decades of neglect the amount of Research and Development that would be needed to build a new plane has pushed any cost estimates sky high. It may take at least another 3 decades before we see the likes of Concorde again. So perhaps Concorde will remain the greatest plane ever built for many years to come?

Also of interest

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