It was the king of the skies, and to live up to its title, its final flight was planned and executed to resemble the procession of a hearse and funeral cortege carrying a monarch to his final destination. On Wednesday, November 26, 2003, the British Airways Concorde supersonic jet, G-BOAF, taxied to the runway and gently touched down at the small Bristol Filton Airport in southwest England, its final stop before being transferred to the Aviation Museum.
Thus, discreetly after much pomp, the world’s most luxurious, fastest, and most glamorous aircraft gave its final cheers after more than three decades of crossing the Atlantic on the shortest flights in the history of commercial aviation, linking Paris and London with New York.
The final ceremony, with that exhibition flight from London Heathrow Airport, flying over the Clifton Suspension Bridge before finally touching down on the small Bristol Filton runway, was also the culmination of a death that had been foreshadowed in April of that same year, when Air France and British Airways announced the imminent end of their flights with the supersonic aircraft.
The Concorde’s agony had been long and painful, but its final flights—for there were more than one—resembled the improvement some patients show shortly before dying. At a time when demand for seats had plummeted, those last flights were operated with full planes.
After announcing its retirement of the Concorde from its fleet, Air France operated its last transatlantic commercial flight on May 30, 2003, from Paris to New York, with a passenger list comprised exclusively of VIPs and senior company officials. Then, the same plane made several exhibition flights in US territory until returning to France on June 27, when it landed in Toulouse never to take off again.
