A half-century after its first flight, the legacy of the Concorde’s engineering genius lives on, especially in the new breed of aviation startups and companies seeking to bring back supersonic travel. No supersonic airliner has risen to take is place-yet.
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Because of difficult economics and the physical realities of air travel beyond the speed of sound, the Concorde retired more than 15 years ago. ✈︎ Want more badass planes delivered straight to your inbox? Join Pop Mech Pro! Tickets were outrageously expensive-the average transatlantic round-trip flight cost approximately $12,000-but living in the future, even for just a few hours, has never been cheap. The plane cruised higher than 50,000 feet, revealing the curvature of the Earth at a casual glance out the window. From 1976 to 2003, the Concorde shrank the Atlantic Ocean in half, ferrying passengers from New York to London or Paris in a just three and a half hours. Though marred by tragedy, the air show of ’73 signaled that the supersonic era had arrived-and that the Concorde would be its vanguard. But the Soviet plane swerved suddenly during ascent and dropped like a stone onto the nearby village of Goussainville, where it killed six in the plane and eight on the ground. The Soviet-built TU-144, like its British/French competitor, sought to usher in a new era of supersonic passenger travel. The crowd of 200,000 spectators that gathered near the runway at Le Bourget Airport for the 1973 Paris Air Show watched the star of the day, the Concorde, climb toward the horizon.
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The pointy-nosed plane barreled down the French tarmac and into the air.