Watching the world go by

SUPERSONIC travel for airline passengers came to an end on October 24th 2003 when a British Airways Concorde completed the last scheduled flight from New York to London. With the ability to cruise at 2,160kph (1,350mph, or around Mach 2—twice the speed of sound) the fastest a Concorde made it across the Atlantic was a shade under three hours, compared with the seven or eight hours it takes in a subsonic airliner. A number of things did for Concorde, including heavy fuel consumption, its sonic boom restricting speed over land and a fall in passengers after an Air France Concorde crashed in Paris in 2000, killing all 109 people on board. No replacement aircraft has ever emerged. But a supersonic executive jet may be a different matter.