Jet-Setters Probably Won’t Miss the Concorde

How will Mick Jagger even be Mick Jagger without the Concorde?

In a blow to jet-setters everywhere, British Airways and Air France have announced that they will end the supersonic Concorde’s commercial service in October -- closing a 27-year era in public air travel as excessive as George Hamilton’s tan and as shameless as a Sylvia Kristel soft-porn movie.

The aging fleet of needle-nose Concordes -- British Airways operates seven, Air France has five -- has seen its customer base of celebrities and rich executives turn away in favor of private jets, which can slip in and out of small airports on demand, without having to encounter commoners or security guards.

At the same time, the general public has forsaken the Concorde’s blinding speed in favor of cheap tickets and flexible schedules. In a world where commercial air travel means long security lines, knees-to-nose seating and bags of pretzels instead of hot meals, the Concorde has just become too expensive to operate.

“This is the end of a fantastic era in world aviation,” British Airways Chief Executive Rod Eddington said in a statement Thursday. Retiring the planes “is a prudent business decision at a time when we are having to make difficult decisions right across the airline.”

Until now, nothing about the Concorde has been prudent. A round-trip ticket for a flight next week from New York to London costs nearly $13,000 on the British Airways Web site.

Traveling at twice the speed of sound, a Concorde can cross the Atlantic in three hours, about half the time of the fastest conventional passenger jet. Concordes fly at 50,000 feet, at least 10,000 feet higher than ordinary planes.

Developed in the late 1960s and introduced commercially in 1976, the Concorde became the ultimate status symbol of the beautiful set -- and for people who aspired to join them.

When Princess Diana made her first royal visit to New York in 1989, she flew on the Concorde (without Prince Charles). When Rod Stewart got a lousy haircut during a 1991 U.S. concert tour, a Concorde rushed his stylist in from London. After Princess Grace died, the National Enquirer chartered a Concorde to get 30 reporters to France before the competition.

“There’s always been a cachet,” said travel industry consultant David Newkirk, who recalls sitting behind Ray Charles on one flight and seeing wrestler Hulk Hogan take up most of the aisle on another.

But times have left the plane about as dated as Robert Wagner’s lapels in the movie “The Concorde: Airport ’79.”

“In many ways, the old glamour of air travel has been replaced with private aviation,” Newkirk said.

“Private flying is what first class used to be, and first and business class is where the old coach used to be, and coach is replacing the Greyhound bus,” he added.

John Travolta pilots his own Boeing 707, while business travelers flock to no-frills carriers such as Southwest.

“The market is splitting between extremes,” said Richard Aboulafia, an aviation expert with consulting firm Teal Group.

That dynamic grounded Boeing Co.’s recent attempt to design a super-fast passenger plane called the Sonic Cruiser, Aboulafia said. When Boeing shopped the idea around to its airline customers, it discovered that no one wanted speed. The airlines wanted planes that could carry lots of passengers efficiently on a variety of routes, short and long.

The U.S. government came to much the same conclusion in the late 1960s when it considered developing its own supersonic transport to compete with the European Concorde, said Donald Lopez, deputy director of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington.

“The advantage you get from a little more speed doesn’t pay off, I don’t think,” Lopez said. “A lot of people think it was a mistake to build the first ones.”

In fact, Concordes stopped flying into and out of Washington Dulles International Airport in 1994 because of dwindling demand.

Second-guessing of the Concorde grew most serious in 2000, when Air France crashed one on takeoff from Charles de Gaulle International Airport outside Paris, killing 113.

A debate about their age and safety kept all Concordes grounded for more than a year, though the cause of the crash turned out to be debris on the runway.

Once they resumed flying, there were nagging mechanical problems, such as a New York-bound flight last year that lost part of its rudder over the North Atlantic.

The planes also have provoked wrath for the noise of their engines and sonic booms. Rep. Anthony D. Weiner (D-N.Y.), whose district is near New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, issued a statement gloating over the planes’ demise.

“The Concorde is loud, unreliable and has been literally falling to pieces for years,” Weiner said. “It should have been grounded a long time ago.”

British Airways said it will give its planes to museums when they finish flying Oct. 31. Air France in 1989 promised one to the National Air and Space Museum, Lopez said.

Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Atlantic Airways Ltd., has said he would be interested in taking the planes from British Airways and keeping them in service.

But British Airways said it prefers to put the planes on display, and several experts scoffed at the idea that anyone could make money off of Concordes anymore.

Branson might want to look to the example of his own advertising pitchman, fictional jet-setter Austin Powers. As swingin’ as he is, Austin Powers never flies the Concorde in the movies -- he has his own plane.