In 1971 Flight International produced a special edition on Concorde. It said: "The dawn of supersonic commercial flight is upon us. Within the decade Concorde should be claiming international business, saving passengers time and making money for airlines.
"Here we present a review of the prospects for Concorde - we show the sonic boom to be a minor issue.
"Concorde will sell at £24 million. The return on the investment should be 15%.
"In the same year Richard Wiggs, in his book Concorde the Case Against Supersonic Transport, and in national newspapers, made criticism of supersonic flight intellectually respectable. He pointed out that a vast sum of money was irrecoverably spent on an aircraft which:
makes an intolerable damaging sonic bang and unacceptable noise at airports; would be unprofitable to operate; in terms of aircraft capacity and environmental acceptability was already out of date; was in any commercial sense unsaleable.The history of Concorde bears out this assessment.
Margaret Wiggs
Biggleswade, Bedfordshire, UK
Source: Flight International
