Concorde was the Anglo-French supersonic airliner that, for 27 years, let paying passengers cross the Atlantic faster than the planet turned the morning into afternoon. Born of a 1962 treaty between Britain and France, it was a turbojet-powered delta-wing aircraft cruising at Mach 2.04 — a little over twice the speed of sound — carrying about 100 passengers from New York to London in roughly three and a half hours, less than half the time of a conventional jet. It first flew in 1969 and entered scheduled service on January 21, 1976.
From the start, Concorde was a triumph of engineering and a problem of economics. Only 20 aircraft were ever built, and just 14 entered commercial service, flown exclusively by British Airways and Air France after the original wave of airline orders from carriers around the world collapsed. The aircraft was magnificent and ruinously expensive: it burned enormous quantities of fuel, demanded intensive maintenance, and — because supersonic flight over land was banned in most countries to prevent sonic-boom damage — was effectively confined to transatlantic and a few other overwater routes.
For decades the two airlines kept it flying as a prestige product, charging premium first-class fares to executives and celebrities who valued the time saved and the cachet. But the underlying business was always fragile, and a cascade of blows in the early 2000s ended it. The only fatal Concorde crash, Air France Flight 4590 at Gonesse near Paris on July 25, 2000, killed 113 people and grounded the fleet for over a year. The post-September 11 travel slump and a downturn in premium traffic eroded demand, and Airbus, the manufacturer’s successor, decided to stop supporting the aircraft.
British Airways and Air France retired Concorde in 2003. Air France flew its last commercial service on May 31, 2003; British Airways operated its final scheduled flights on October 24, 2003, with a ceremonial retirement flight on November 26, 2003. No supersonic airliner has flown passengers in scheduled service since — a rare case of a technology that, having reached the future, was deliberately walked back.
For the first decades of the twentieth century, the rigid airship promised a future of luxurious long-distance flight. These were vast lighter-than-air craft built around a structural framework of girders, filled with cells of lifting gas, and capable of carrying passengers in comfort over distances that early airplanes could not yet manage. The most successful were the German Zeppelins, pioneered by Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, whose first airship, LZ 1, flew in 1900.
The concept moved quickly from spectacle to scheduled service. The German company DELAG, founded in 1909, ran the world’s first airline to carry fare-paying passengers by air, using Zeppelins for sightseeing and transport before the First World War. After the war, the Graf Zeppelin (LZ 127) of 1928 became the format’s great proof of concept, flying more than a million miles, circling the globe in 1929, and establishing the first regular intercontinental passenger service across the South Atlantic to Brazil.
The Hindenburg (LZ 129) of 1936 represented the apex of the idea: a flying ocean liner with a dining room, lounge, and promenade decks, crossing the North Atlantic in roughly two and a half days. But the era was shadowed by catastrophe. Britain’s R101 crashed in 1930, and the American naval airships USS Akron and USS Macon were lost in 1933 and 1935. These disasters had already shaken confidence in the rigid airship before its most famous tragedy.
On May 6, 1937, the Hindenburg caught fire while landing at Lakehurst, New Jersey, and was destroyed in well under a minute, killing 35 of the 97 people aboard along with one member of the ground crew, 36 dead in all. The disaster was captured on film and in Herbert Morrison’s anguished radio commentary. Public confidence in passenger airships collapsed, and the format, already strained by accidents and rising airplane performance, came to an effective end.
For most of the twentieth century, Pan American World Airways was less an airline than an idea of American reach. Founded in 1927 by Juan Trippe, it became the de facto flag carrier of a country that had no official one, the company that taught the United States how to fly across oceans. The blue globe on its tailfins was a corporate logo doing the work of a national emblem, and for decades the assumption that Pan Am went wherever it wanted was, more or less, true.
It earned that stature by being first at almost everything that mattered. Pan Am pioneered transoceanic passenger flight with the Clipper flying boats of the 1930s, launched the commercial jet age as the launch customer for the Boeing 707, and ushered in the wide-body era as the airline that talked Boeing into building the 747. By the time Stanley Kubrick put a Pan Am shuttle into the orbital sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the brand had become cultural shorthand for the future itself.
And yet Pan Am carried a structural flaw that its glamour disguised: it had built a magnificent international network on top of almost no domestic one. As long as overseas flying was tightly regulated and Pan Am held the routes, that did not matter. After the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 turned US aviation into a brawl, it mattered enormously. Pan Am had no domestic feeder system to fill its international seats, and no easy way to build one.
The end came in pieces — an oil shock, a ruinous acquisition, a fire sale of the company’s best assets, and finally the December 1988 bombing of Flight 103 over Lockerbie, which killed 270 people and broke whatever confidence travelers had left. Pan Am filed for bankruptcy in January 1991 and shut down for good on December 4, 1991, the most famous name in the history of commercial aviation switching off its lights in a single afternoon.