October 24, 2003: Concorde's last commercial flight.

[lapfog_1]

1. while an amazing feat of engineering for it's time

It had a lot of issues, chiefly was the per passenger fuel consumption.... the worst in commercial aviation.

Not being allowed to fly supersonic over the US meant that the routes were pretty restricted.

All of this meant that ticket prices were high... so high as to make it out of the reach of the typical airline passenger.

Add to that the one fatal crash because of runway incursion... and the bloom was off the rose of supersonic passenger travel.

Still, I worked on the US replacement ( the "Space Plane" ) for a number of years while at NASA. Almost sorry that the program "went black" and commercial worked stopped on the concept by the late 1990s. Of course, there is the rumored "Aurora" project which may or may not be a reality.

https://www.nasa.gov/langley/feature/setting-the-spaceplane-stage

https://www.disclose.tv/project-aurora-lockheed-martin-just-confirmed-theyre-building-the-sr-72-315211