British Airways retired the Concorde
from service in 2003.
Concorde holds numerous world records, including fastest crossing of the Atlantic from New York to London in 2 hours 54 minutes and 45 seconds. It flies at Mach 2 (1350mph) - more than twice the speed of sound.
The world's fastest civil aircraft, both in the air and on the ground, Concorde is the only aircraft that lets you arrive in New York before you leave London. From 250mph on take-off to a cruising speed of 1350mph, she takes you through the sound barrier to travel at twice the speed of sound flying on the edge of space - 60,000ft above the ground.
Concorde measures 204ft in length - stretching between six and ten inches in-flight due to heating of the airframe. She is painted in a specially developed white paint to accommodate these changes and to dissipate the heat generated by supersonic flight. The wingspan is 83ft 8ins - much less than conventional subsonic aircraft as Concorde flies in totally different way using "Vortex Lift" to achieve her exceptional performance. The height is 37ft 1ins. The characteristic droop nose is lowered to improve pilots' visibility for take-off and landing.
Concorde's four engines - specially designed Rolls-Royce/ Snecma Olympus 593s - give more than 38,000lbs of thrust each, with 'reheat'. This adds fuel to the final stage of the engine to produce the extra power required for take-off and the transition to supersonic flight. They are the most powerful pure jet engines flying commercially.
Concorde takes off at 220 knots (250mph) (compared with 165 knots for most subsonic aircraft). She cruises at around 1350mph - more than twice the speed of sound - and at an altitude of up to 60,000 ft (over 11 miles high). A typical London to New York crossing takes a little less than three and a half hours as opposed to about eight hours for a subsonic flight. Travelling Westwards, the five-hour time difference means Concorde effectively arrives before she has taken off. She travels "faster than the sun".
More than 2.5 million passengers have flown supersonically on British Airways' Concorde since she entered commercial service in 1976. The most frequent passenger, an oil company executive, has clocked up almost 70 round trip transatlantic crossings a year.
Since entering, commercial service, British Airways Concordes have operated almost 50,000 flights, travelling some 145 million miles and clocking up more than 145,000 flying hours - over 100,000 of them supersonically. Each Concorde is young in
"aeroplane years" having completed about the same number of take-offs and landings as a 3-4 year old 737 and the same number of hours as a 4-5 year old 747. British Airways has clocked up more supersonic miles than all the world's Air Forces.
Supersonic airline research in Europe began in 1956 and resulted in the British and French Governments signing an international treaty for the joint design, development and manufacture of a supersonic airliner six years later. The first prototype was rolled out at Toulouse in 1967 and since then, there have been a number of notable dates in the history of Concorde.
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