WOK's right - we seem to be stuck in a feedback loop here with very few facts.
Particularly the regular posting "BA, having secured her commercially for themselves whilst others sought to operate her".
When Concorde entered commercial service absolutely nobody, not even BA, wanted it. Every airline with an option on purchase had cancelled and the government (who built it) had to run it under their own airline's (unwilling) operation. No one else "sought to operate her".
After selling the Concorde and the rest of the airline into the private sector, BA was required to pay millions toward Concorde R&D (far from the "free gift" story trotted out by the uninformed) in order to keep the operation and in very brave and ingenious "sink or swim" style made the operation work commercially and launched the supersonic transport into the success it became. BA built the successful SST operation from the economically bankrupt nationalised start and earned every penny of it, other airlines may have looked on enviously in the late '80s & '90s, but they had missed the boat by then.
Branson keeps needling that he'd "condsider it" or words to that effect, but the truth is nobody else could or would take it on now - it would be like trying to transplant a 200-year old oak tree into a garden allotment. Good for headline-grabbing, but BA has no duty to "give" Concorde to anyone else and nor would anyone else want it - they couldn't run it because the whole support infrastructure is so massive.
All that has happened here is that someone has noticed that all aeroplanes have a finite life, Concorde has served many more years than most others (maybe all? I don't know) and have then asked BA when is it due to retire. BA quite reasonably said "at some stage, but we don't yet know when - we'll tell you when the decision is made" and that didn't satisfy the hacks, who interpreted "sometime" as meaning gloom and failure. For heaven's sake even the Daily T. said something along the lines of "early retirment looms for Concorde" - early retirement??? Almost 30 years from introduction into service and 34 years from her first flight - "early retirement"!!!.
The capricious high cost / high revenue nature of an SST means that the commercially sensible operator will carefully monitor the latter years of the aircraft's life. That is all that is happening here - ultimately we must accept that all good things must come to an end. But not just yet, there are some years still left to serve, and even then - we bloody did it, didn't we!
Last edited by NW1; 2nd Mar 2003 at 14:45.