Concorde was the world’s only supersonic airliner.  Built, at enormous expense by the British and French governments, she was certainly the most beautiful aeroplane ever to appear in the sky.  Stuffed with technological innovations of the 1960’s, she came a cropper when OPEC racheted up the price of fuel oil in the early 70’s and thereafter ran at a huge loss for 23 years as the flagship of British Airways and Air France.  Mainly she shuttled across the Atlantic between Paris and Washington, Heathrow and New York City.  I flew on her over 300 times. Without Concorde, I could never have built my US businesses to the degree I did.  Because of the time difference, if you left at 10:30 am in the morning from London, you usually landed around 9:00 am at JFK, New York, on the same morning — an incredible boon to time-starved business executives.  She was cramped inside, the seats so tiny that I have seen fat men and women forced to disembark the aircraft before take off because they physically could not fit into the space provided.  The lavatories were smaller than a stationary cupboard. The plane itself was cross-grained and desperately temperamental— both passenger cabins numbingly loud and often stinking of a mixture of ozone and aviation fuel — but oh! how the bitch could fly.  My fastest journey was late one Christmas Eve in ‘84, only 12 passengers on board, JFK airport to Heathrow.  We timed it, take-off to landing, at an incredible 2 hrs and 55 minutes.  Oh, and Concorde very nearly killed me once in mid Atlantic.  But that’s a story for another day.  All in all, I loved her and her crews to bits, and mourned her passing.