It is indeed a sad day. What used to be a vision for the future has been left in the past. Silly really. If the Americans had continued their own development, there`d be competition, or if the Russian`s effort had caught on (though you`d need to put a gun to my head to get me in anything Russian), there`d have been a market for such aircraft. It was inevidable that it`d fail in the end (in the current aircraft market), though this is too soon if you ask me. It could have lasted much longer if it weren`t for that one crash and 911. After that crash it did actually recover, but the 911 thing made airlines go into budget mode. Concorde, just wouldn`t fit into this. It was too old and too complicated to be run as a low cost airliner. If a new one was developed, but required much less running costs, it`d be a winner for sure! Not easy though. The development alone would easily run close if not way over £10bn, and take about 20 years. Not the kind of project for one country. Even America think twice, about such a thing. That sort of development time/cost is always put into creating military aircraft like the B2 Spirit. After all that there is the issue of many countries banning them. I`m sure with more sensible design and noise reduction this could be easily changed. The future is bright, but a way off. :-( Hypersonic using SCRam jets could be the future, but that is A LONG way off!
Concorde was/is very safe. Safer than getting out of bed...most likely. Yes it only had one crash and yes it was in service for 35 years. However each airframe had much less flight time than other subsonic aircraft of a similar age. Still very safe, and even safer now. The safety doesn`t have anything to do with it going out of service anyway. Just marketing. Marketing can do alsorts of bad things, even if it goes right.. *cough* Microsoft *cough*
:cry:
