Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder, Friday the 20th of October.

I'm at London Heathrow, lucky me. And 20 years ago, at this airport, the busiest in Britain,

plans were being made to mark the end of an era. Yes, it was on the 24th of October 2003 that British

Airways Flight 2 from New York JFK touched down, bringing to an end the era of supersonic

passenger flight.

Here's how it worked.

Concord, well, was always a bit of a joke.

This Anglo-French Grand Proje, which was created really in the 1960s

from 1950s military aircraft technology to transport just 100 people at 1,350

miles an hour, twice the speed of sound and more than twice the speed of conventional subsonic

jets. Very exciting.

Just incredibly unsuccessful.

There are only, I think, a dozen planes ever built, or at least entered service.

Only British Airways and Air France flew them.

They did do a little bit on behalf of, for instance, Singapore Airlines and

Braniff of the US in terms of flying little bits for them. But basically, the whole idea

was incredibly expensive to the long-suffering taxpayer in both France and in the UK.

Just at the time when aviation was being democratised with the jumbo jet, the UK and France were

going in utterly the wrong direction and they were also traumatising the planet.

Environmentally, it was terrible. Yes, I calculate the fuel burn for Concord

was four times more than the Airbus A350 currently flown by British Airways and which carries

more than three times as many passengers. The harm per person was just off the scale.

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