@ mike wsm
Why, sir do you say Concorde should never have been built ? Before the 747, experience had shown that speed paid - remember that Concorde, carrying about 100 passengers could do 2 transatlantic round trips per day, while current aircraft at the time could only do one, carrying less than 200 passengers (argue about these figures if you will - I'm happy here with approximations as I'm not doing a cost/benefit analysis). At fuel prices before the first big rise, Concorde's economics worked.
That's what industry and governments had to go on, apart from prestige.
Simplistically, as the hare compared with tortoises, Concorde was supposed to be to its slower contemporaries what the Comet was to its (leaving aside the Comet's own weaknesses, discovered later, such as square windows and the inability of riveters at deH's to achieve the tight tolerances needed at the corners).
Your insistence on dropping the 'e' is peculiarly pedantic - the aircraft was properly named "Concorde" by agreement, to symbolise the "joint-ness" of the project.
You can carp all you will - Concorde was an immense technical success - and scared the bejasus out of "the cousins" who didn't manage to achieve anything like it - and incidentally put whatever hindrances they could to its operation.
Personally, being a peaceful type*, I also think it was "good" that, while other nations' large supersonic aircraftwere designed to destroy, Concorde was designed for peaceful purposes.
*But at the time a proud member of Britain's airborne striking power.
Last edited by Jig Peter; 16th Dec 2010 at 14:55.
Reason: add last sentence