Have you ever flown on a Concorde? Know anyone who has? No, we didn't think so. Not many people have, despite the fact that the elegant, needle-nosed, supersonic aircraft has been plying the skies for 27 years. And there's a good reason for that. It boils down to a single number: $9,300, which is how much a trans-Atlantic round trip on Concorde has cost lately. In an era when savvy travelers can pay as little as $400 to fly subsonic round-trip between New York and London (or New York and Tokyo, for that matter), Concorde's sky-high fares just don't make much sense.
So it's hard to get too upset about British Airways' and Air France's joint announcement earlier this month that the birdlike plane will be permanently retired by the end of October. Clearly, there are more urgent concerns in the world today than the fact that some very wealthy CEOs and celebrities are going to have to take as long as the rest of us to jet between London or Paris and New York, the only Concorde routes that have proved commercially viable.
Environmentalists are actually pleased about the aircraft's demise, having long labeled it one of the worst noisemakers on the planet. According to people who live near any of the three Concorde destinations -- London's Heathrow, New York's John F. Kennedy and Paris' Charles de Gaulle airports -- the boom made by the plane at takeoff and landing is so loud that it shakes houses and rattles windows. It's "like a daily insult," said the president of Sane Aviation for Everyone (SAFE), a New York-based antinoise coalition, last week. In fact, it was environmental groups that hobbled Concorde's options from the start -- for example, by ensuring the passage of legislation prohibiting supersonic flights over the continental United States.