Concorde by numbers – from minus 60C to £9,179

Minus 60 Temperature in Celsius of the outside air at Concorde’s highest altitude, 60,000 feet

1 Number of female pilots and flight engineers employed on British Airways’ Concorde operations; the corresponding number for men is 171.

Barbara Harmer had an interesting career as a hairdresser and air traffic controller before becoming a pilot for British Caledonian. When that airline was taken over by BA, Ms Harmer applied to be trained for the supersonic jet and flew it for the final 10 years of Concorde’s commercial service, 1993-2003.

2 Concorde aircraft ordered by Iran Air, and later cancelled – like all other orders, except those for British Airways and Air France.

2.02 Cruising speed of Concorde expressed as a Mach number (ratio of the speed of a body to the speed of sound), equal to around 1,350mph – faster than a rifle bullet.

2.33 Average daily hours flown by each BA Concorde in test and training flights as well as passenger operations. For comparison, a current British Airways 777 that has been in service for 27 years has racked up an impressive average of 12.7 hours per day – more than five times longer.

3 Flight crew on Concorde: captain, first officer and flight engineer. In addition, the passengers were served by six or seven cabin crew.

20 Number of Concordes built. For comparison, the Boeing 737 – which first flew two years before Concorde – has sold around 12,300.

27 Years in which Concorde flew commercially, from 1976 to 2003.

31 Position in UK charts reached by Oasis’s debut single in 1994, ‘Supersonic’. The highest-ranking song with “supersonic” in the lyrics is believed to be ‘Don’t stop me now’ by Queen, which reached no 9 in 1979.

48 Miles flown by Concorde per ton of fuel; the Airbus A350 manages close to 200 miles, and carries three times as many passengers.

84 Wingspan, in feet, of Concorde. The Airbus A380’s wingspan is over three times wider.

100 Number of passenger seats on each production Concorde. Seating in the narrow fuselage was single class, comprising two seats on either side of the aisle. The “seat pitch” was 38 inches – nine inches more than Ryanair.

113 Deaths in the Air France Concorde crash in Paris on 25 July 2000. Flight AF4590 was a cruise charter from Paris to New York JFK. While accelerating to take off, a tyre on the plane’s left-hand undercarriage struck a strip of metal that had fallen five minutes earlier from a departing Continental Airlines DC-10. The tyre exploded, and a chunk of rubber ruptured a fuel tank in the left wing. Fuel spilled and caught fire, making the Concorde unflyable. Despite the efforts of the pilots, it crashed two minutes later.

Of the victims, 100 were passengers, nine were crew and four were staff at the Hotelissimo hotel near Charles de Gaulle airport, where the plane came down.

150 Amount in pounds I paid to act as a courier on a London-New York flight in 1986.

173 Minutes between take-off and touchdown of the fastest New York JFK-London Heathrow flight, on 7 February 1996.

For comparison, an extremely fast British Airways 777 subsonic flight on the same route on 19 January 2026 – almost three decades later – took 340 minutes: almost twice as long,

350 Initial forecast of how many Concordes would be bought. British Airways and Air France turned out to be the only customers, ordering seven each – a combined total of 4 per cent of the predicted market.

431 Opening return fare, in pounds, from London to Washington DC when Concorde started flying the route in May 1976.

4,500 Maximum range in miles of Concorde. On the 4,196-mile trip from London to Barbados, passenger numbers were generally capped at 80 – with 20 seats unsold to reduce weight. Even so, it was sometimes necessary to refuel en route: usually at Shannon in Ireland, but sometimes the Portuguese capital, Lisbon.

9,179 Price in pounds of a return flight from London to New York on Concorde shortly before the supersonic aircraft was grounded.