Cultural Power Node

Concorde Memory

Concorde Experience, London

Legendary · held by 447 collectors

Concorde — the Anglo-French supersonic passenger aircraft developed jointly by Aérospatiale and the British Aircraft Corporation, entering scheduled service with Air France and British Airways in January 1976 and retiring in October 2003 after 27 years of commercial operation — is the only commercial transport vehicle in history to have been retired not because it became technologically obsolete but because the economics of operating a 100-seat aircraft whose fuel consumption per passenger exceeded any other commercial aircraft made it unviable at ticket prices the market would bear following the 2003 recession and the 2000 Air France accident at Charles de Gaulle. Its specific operational statistics — Mach 2.02 (2,179 km/h), London Heathrow to New York JFK in 3 hours 30 minutes at a cruising altitude of 18,000 metres (above 95% of the atmosphere, high enough that passengers could observe the curvature of the earth through the cabin windows), a cabin temperature at the leading edge of 127°C caused by aerodynamic heating at Mach 2 — represent a standard of performance that no commercial aircraft has since equalled. As a Cultural Power Node, Concorde Memory maps the class of technology experiences whose intelligence value derives from their permanent unavailability: Concorde is the only commercial aviation experience that is definitively over, making any memory or artefact of it a documentation of a capability that existed and was then withdrawn. The Concorde Experience at the Fleet Air Arm Museum (Yeovilton), the preserved aircraft at Heathrow, Dulles, Intrepid, and Le Bourget, and the audio-visual records of the aircraft's specific sensory signature — the droop nose descending for landing, the afterburner ignition sound at V1, the Mach meter crossing 1.0 in the cabin — constitute the only access points to an experience that 2.5 million passengers had and that no living person will have again.

Concorde · Aviation · Heritage · Speed · History