For some time it appeared that the whole world wanted the revolutionary Anglo-French airliner. As excitement built toward the aircraft’s first flight, it looked as if Concorde was shaping up to be a supersonic success story. Not to spearhead your airline’s fleet with the faster-than-a-speeding-bullet delta seemed as if it would put you at risk of looking a little pedestrian, so the options for orders totted up. By the end of 1967 there were over sixty.
Then it all went wrong. By 1973, when the Soviet Union’s Concorde rival, the Tu-144, appeared at the Paris Air Show, Concorde was already facing rejection on the grounds of cost and the noise. When “Concordski” stalled and fell out of the sky in woods beyond Le Bourget’s perimeter, it seemed to seal Concorde’s fate.
Of the sixteen countries with delivery positions for Concorde, all but three cancelled. British Airways and Air France, the state-owned airlines of the two countries who’d funded her development and built her, each operated seven Concordes.
The third, Australian airline Qantas, appears never to have got around to cancelling its order, but it seems unlikely that they’re still awaiting delivery.
