Remembering the Concorde

Last week marked the 40th anniversary of the first flight of the Concorde. The plane, the only supersonic commercial aircraft, was in service between 1976 and 2003. In 2000, the fiery crash of an Air France Concorde claimed 113 lives.

I saw a Concorde for the fist time this weekend, on display at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum in New York City. Inside the plane, I was struck by the narrow, claustrophobic cabin in the pencil-thin fuselage, the tiny windows and tightly packed rows of seats. Outside, I loved seeing the cool sweep of its delta wings and its stunningly narrow nose.

“I knew that we were approaching our maximum height of 57,000 feet, or more than 10 miles off the ground, when I looked out the window and noticed the slight curvature of the earth,” Philip Shenon wrote for the New York Times in an article about riding the plane from New York to London in 2002. “The Concorde is the only commercial airplane to fly so high that the earth’s shape is detectable.”

The price? The same article reports that in 2002, on British Airways, it was $12,652 round-trip.

At the Intrepid, seeing the iconic plane is included with the price of admission.

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