Who built Concorde?

Concorde was the product of an international treaty signed by France and the United Kingdom in 1962, which obliged both countries to share the program's costs and benefits equally and made no provision for either to withdraw on its own. The aircraft was built by two companies: the French Sud Aviation, absorbed in 1970 by the newly created Aérospatiale, responsible for much of the fuselage and final assembly in Toulouse, and the British BAC (British Aircraft Corporation), which handled other structural sections and final assembly in Filton, near Bristol.

The powerplant — four Olympus 593 afterburning turbojets capable of sustaining supersonic flight without continuous reheat — was developed by Bristol Siddeley (absorbed by Rolls-Royce in 1966) on the British side and by the French Snecma, now part of Safran, on the French side. Aérospatiale would eventually become part of what is today Airbus, while BAC became British Aerospace and later BAE Systems. The successors to both remain leading names in the European aerospace industry.

Unlike other joint programs, Concorde was not built at a single plant: each country manufactured complete sections that were then assembled twice over, once in Toulouse and once in Filton, so that France and the UK each delivered finished aircraft independently to Air France and British Airways. This unusual and costly duplication of production lines reflects the project's political nature well: it was created both to demonstrate shared technological capability and to visibly split the industrial work between the two countries.