Partly out of equal shares, but there was also more flight test development work than could be handled by just one aircraft in a reasonable timescale, and each partner had their own sphere of responsibility to cover so if you have to have two airframes it made some sense to have one each.
Thanks again CliveL
A few pages earlier on this thread some of you have posted some of their favourite photos of Concorde. Here are very sad, chocking and rare photos:
This is 211 (F-BVFD) after "Air France's special treatment" (shame on them). The photos were taken in 1994. More photos of this can be seen here:
Maripa : Documentation photographique.
To compensate, here's one of my favourite:
Most of those photos were taken at Toulouse (we saw a lot from Filton in this thread but very few from France). The caption of the top left picture says it is 102 (F-WTSA) and 201 (F-WTSB) in the background. The image comes from a french website (
Concorde dans la presse de 1965 à 2003) gathering hundreds of articles about Concorde. Very interesting but in French only.
I particulary like this last serie of photos because it shows the process of a dream turning into reality, the beginning of such a beautiful adventure and the symbol of a time where national pride and technical achievment had more importance and value than the basic investment/profitability ratio that rules the world today! And now, more than 40 years later, not only we are not able to build a SST but we are also not able to make a SST flying again.
And this leads to a new question (maybe another 64000$ one):
As we can see in those photos and as I have seen in photos from Filton, several pre-production and production airframes were built at the same time. Did the fabrication of pre-production or production a/c had to be stopped at some point to wait for in flight test results? Similar question: did the early flights revealed unforseen problems that needed to be sorted out before the program can move on?