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The End of an Era BA and Air France to ground Concorde By Kevin Done, Aerospace Correspondent Financial Times (ft.com) April 10 2003 British Airways and Air France are withdrawing Concorde, the flagship of their fleets, from service signalling a premature end to the 27-year era of commercial supersonic flight. BA said the decision had been made for commercial reasons with passenger revenue falling steadily against a backdrop of rising maintenance costs for the aircraft. Air France will stop flying its Concorde fleet at the end of May and BA will retire the aircraft in October. Withdrawal of the seven aircraft from the BA fleet will cost the airline a write-off of £84m ($131.3m) in the year just ended at the end of March, which could jeopardise the group's goal of returning to profit in 2002/03 after suffering a £200m loss in the previous year. Jean-Cyril Spinetta, Air France chief executive, said that operating Concorde "has become a severely and structurally loss-making operation...It would be unreasonable to continue operating it any longer." The announcement of the end for Concorde, for long the symbol of the jet-setting lifestyle of the rich and famous, comes little more than 17 months after BA and Air France triumphantly celebrated the return of the aircraft to the skies. Their supersonic fleets were grounded for more than a year in the wake of the Air France Concorde crash near Paris in July 2000, in which 113 people were killed including 109 passengers and crew. The final demise of Concorde, which might have remained airworthy in engineering terms until well into the next decade, has come, however, for commercial reasons and because of a lack of customers. BA and Air France are the only operators of the aviation icon, with seven Concordes in the BA fleet and five at Air France. The aircraft, the world's only supersonic passenger jet,made its first flight in March 1969 and entered service in early 1976. Cruising at 1,350 miles per hour, more than twice the speed of sound, and at an altitude of up to 60,000 feet close to the edge of space, Concorde has set technical standards that have never been matched. Financially it proved a liability, however, attracting only two customers, the then state-owned airlines of the two countries, the UK and France, that developed the aircraft. It also ran into severe environmental opposition, which in latter years has limited it largely to scheduled flights across the Atlantic between London and Paris and New York. British Airways said that discussions over an extended period with Airbus (the legacy manufacturer after successive takeovers of the original companies that developed Concorde, British Aircraft Corporation and Sud Aviation), had confirmed the need for an enhanced maintenance programme in coming years. "Such an investment cannot be justified in the face of falling revenue caused by a global downturn in demand for all forms of premium travel in the airline industry," said BA. The downturn had a negative impact on Concorde bookings which was "set to continue for the foreseeable future." Rod Eddington, BA chief executive, said "this is the end of a fantastic era in world aviation but bringing forward Concorde's retirement is a prudent business decision at a time, when we are having to make difficult decisions right across the airline." British Airways is already in the midst of a far-reaching restructuring in response to the deep and prolonged crisis in the global aviation industry, and has decided it cannot carry any loss-making operations. As it seeks to make drastic cuts in the cost base, taking out £1.1bn of annualised costs by March 2005, the option of keeping the loss-making Concorde service in operation became more and more untenable. BA is eliminating 13,000 jobs or 23 per cent of the workforce between August 2001 and the end of September this year. Ever since Concorde flights were resumed in November 2001 after the Air France Paris crash, the two airlines have struggled to make them pay in a difficult market. BA has found it commercially impossible to restart the previous twice-daily services between London and New York and had been forced to restrict it to just half that level with one departure a day in each direction, further undermining the economics of the operation. Concorde's present engineering certification would allow the supersonic airliner to continue flying to at least 2009/10, and BA has said previously that further steps could be taken to make it possible to continue flights to 2012/15 depending on the level of usage. BA said it was planning to make its Concordes available for the public to view in museums.