Concorde was an engineering failure.

As an aircraft, she may have been beautiful, packed to the wingtips with advanced technology, a masterpiece of airborne sculpture, a flying artwork.

An engineer is someone who can do for five bob what any fool can do for a pound.

Engineering has to have a  commercial benefit, either direct or through a social benefit for society.

Concorde had neither.

Concorde’s “commercial success” depended very largely on the fact that the development costs were written off by the government and the aircraft was given more or less free to the operating companies. They were not obliged to recoup the development in fare revenue.

Fares on Concorde were very expensive. But this did not matter because hardly anybody paid for their own fare. The bulk of the passengers were executives, hustled back and forth at their companies’ expense as a prestige symbol, both for company and individual.

Concorde’s endurance was severely limited, and this was the secret to her greatly reduced journey times. Because of the limited endurance, the aircraft was given automatic priority from the moment she rolled out of the hangar to discharge at her destination. She had dedicated passenger terminal facilities – no waiting time there. The aircraft had priority from push-back, through taxiing and take-off. Concorde never had to wait for a take-off slot. Had the same priorities and dedicated handling facilities been available to subsonic aircraft, their overall, door-to-door journey times would also have been greatly reduced.

At the other end of the journey, Concorde had automatic priority on landing. The aircraft never had to circle for an hour in a stack over Epsom waiting her turn to land – it simply did not have the fuel and the noise would have been unacceptable. I’m not sure if it ever had to go around to land from the East at Heathrow, it seemed to always appear from the West and simply come in and land.

Within the aircraft and during the project there was certainly some extraordinary engineering and design. There were indeed components and systems that were good engineering in their own right. They would, and probably were, saleable to client companies at a profit.

But, from the overall point of view of an engineering project, Concorde was a flop.

Put it this way, budget airlines are hardly likely to queue up for an aircraft that can fly about 100 victims a time to Lanzarote, extracting more money from each than they will spend on the rest of their holiday. Medium sized companies are unlikely to spend their advertising budget on flying a mediocre sales exec to New York for a meeting in Chicago, when he can fly to the destination direct for half the fare and a shorter overall journey time.