Today is a special day in the history of aviation. That day, November 22, marks the first aerial flight from Paris to New York. The particularity of this trip is that it could be completed in three hours and thirty minutes. You will have guessed it, it is indeed the famous “Concorde”, this flat plane, with its pointed nose, its supersonic speed. It was 1977 when the first commercial flight between the French capital and the great American city took place.
The “battle for profitability” is declared in 1977
Impossible to miss it! With its 61 meters long, its wingspan of 25 meters, its speed that can exceed 2,300 km / h, and its ability to fly up to 18,000 meters in altitude, the Concorde deserves its reputation: making journeys in one Record time. A time that no other aircraft could perform, not even the famous Boeing 747. The emblem of Franco-British engineering came to compete with the United States in their progress in the field of aeronautics. After countless prestigious and test flights, the Concorde took off on November 22, 1977, from Roissy Charles-de-Gaulle airport at 11:11 a.m. Three and a half hours later, the plane landed at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. A major turning point in the history of aviation.
The end of a dream
A Concorde aircraft on display at Paris CDG airport.
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But all this was not to last. Everyone remembers what happened on July 25, 2000. A date forever remembered, when the Concorde on Air France flight 4590, bound for New York, crashed into a hotel in Gonesse, Île-de-France, after hitting a metal lost on the tarmac at the airport which subsequently set one of the rear engines on fire. The drama unfolded just seconds after takeoff from Paris Charles-De-Gaulle airport, resulting in the deaths of 113 people. This is the only accident that involved a Concorde. Only one was enough, since this accident led to the definitive cessation of the operation of the supersonic aircraft from 2003.
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