I'm not stirring it, honest, but for gawd's sake let's ditch the mawkish rose-tinted sentimentality and face a few facts. Concorde was a technological blind alley, probably the worst exemplar of the British bent for chasing engineering chimera when others were building useful stuff. As a taxpayer I've poured in my share of the mountain of money that's gone into the maw of this machine, and my sentiments have been mixed. Personally I'd rather the Americans had built Concorde and we'd built the 747, because then we'd still have an aircraft industry. Instead, we've got a bunch of nostalgia-tripping duffers with hearts bursting with pride. Knock it off.