Where is Concorde now?

Concorde flew between 1976 and 2003 with British Airways and Air France, the only pair of airlines ever to operate it commercially. The program was shut down due to rising maintenance costs, falling demand after the 2000 Air France crash in Paris, and the lack of a profitable technological successor. Since then, no supersonic passenger aircraft has returned to regular service, so more than two decades later Concorde remains the only case of sustained supersonic commercial aviation.

Twenty units were built, counting prototypes, pre-production aircraft and production models, of which 18 are preserved as museum pieces. In France, one is on display at the Air and Space Museum in Le Bourget, near Paris. In the United Kingdom there are examples at Filton, Duxford, the Fleet Air Arm Museum, the National Museum of Flight Scotland, and Manchester Airport. In the United States, one is displayed aboard the museum ship Intrepid in New York. There are also units open to visitors in Sinsheim (Germany) and in Barbados, where the type once flew a regular route from London.

Concorde cruised at Mach 2, crossing the Atlantic between London or Paris and New York in just over three hours, half the time of a subsonic jet. Its seats cost several times more than a conventional business-class fare, which always limited its market to a small number of passengers. That balance between operating cost, sonic-boom noise and profitability explains both its iconic success and its eventual retirement. The surviving aircraft are displayed statically: none remain airworthy, since their certificates of airworthiness expired with the retirement and manufacturer support ended along with it.