When the last of the Concordes was retired the world was a little greyer; much as on the day when the transatlantic ocean liners passed into history.  The Concorde was a familiar part of the last decades of the 20^th century, but we'd become so used to thinking of them as a handful of luxury planes accessible to the very few that we forget that when they were still on the drawing boards the supersonic passenger liner was supposed to be a mainstay of air travel, not a rarity, and that every major airline with a long-distance service was expected to operate them. 

After all, the supersonic passenger liner was the next logical step in air travel.  First open-cockpit planes, then multi-engined planes, closed cabins, pressurised cabins, turboprops, jets, and finally supersonic. What else was the future supposed to be except ever higher and faster? 

When Barnes Wallis put forward his famous Swallow supersonic aeroplane in the 1950s, it could have jumped right off the pages of Amazing Science Fiction at Mach 2.5.  It was a sweeping dart of a design with the fuselage blending into the swing-wings and no tail at all, because control would be achieved by the pairs of engines that sat on pivots on the very wing tips. 

But like many tantalising previews of Future Past it never got out of the wind tunnel and, beginning with the Anglo-French alliance that began building Concorde in 1962, more conservative ideas dominated.

The United States, having already successfully designed a supersonic bomber, could hardly leave the field the the British and the French, so they soon started a federal competition for proposals for a design to beat the Concorde.  American aviation firms jumped at the chance for government contracts and a shot at the supersonic market and blueprints and mockups appeared for an American Supersonic Transport, such as this Boeing design that not only incorporated swing wings, and an in-flight television entertainment system, which we're only now beginning to see in service.

An even flashier idea was this delta-winged aircraft from Lockheed with blended canard wings like something off of a fighter plane, but even as more and more elegant designs came forward from the manufacturers, the horrendous economics of SST travel and the environmentalist lobby killed off the American effort in 1971.

And then there was the Soviet effort, the Tu-144, which was so similar in design to the Concorde that it was dubbed by the West "Concordski."  Could the Russians have done anything so shoddy as to lift the Anglo-French design, make a few changes, and palm it off as their own?  Would that nice Mister Khrushchev have allowed that?  Hands up everyone who wants to buy a bridge as well.

Whatever the truth, Concordski was the only other SST to enter commercial service, but a horrendous air crash in full view of the world's press at the Paris Air Show in 1973 killed off the programme as if it were a Republican fund raiser hosted by Michael Moore. 

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