Supersonic Flight Is Returning. I Went on Board the First Concorde.

This hall is actually part of the Musée de l’Air et de l’Espace, which is part of Paris’s Le Bourget Airport and can be visited year-round.

As a journalist, I was able to get a ticket for free. Usually, a “boarding pass” ticket for the museum costs between 6 euros and 17 euros ($7 to $20), depending on your age.

Concorde 001, with the tail number F-WTSS, was the first prototype built and made its first flight in 1969.

It was retired to the museum four years later.

Information boards shared more about the history of this momentous airplane. For example, it was used to carry out scientific experiments during a 1973 eclipse, with cameras and windows installed in the roof.

Concorde was the first airliner to use fly-by-wire controls, which means electronic signals are sent to a computer that processes the pilots’ inputs.

It was previously only used on military aircraft, but is commonplace today. The technology helped the A320 become Airbus’s first major success.

Concorde’s cockpit also included a third seat for a flight engineer, and controls for the “droopsnoot” — a lengthy, pointed nose. Used to add aerodynamic efficiency, the nose could be drooped 10° for more visibility during takeoff and landing.

The British Aviation Corporation and France’s Sud Aviation jointly built and developed Concorde. (Mergers and acquisitions over the years saw the former become part of BAE Systems, and the latter part of Airbus.)

Concorde was a symbol not just of national pride for the UK and France but also of international cooperation between them. Indeed, the jet’s name comes from the French for “agreement” or “union.”

Meanwhile, work on the Boeing 2707, a larger and faster supersonic airliner, was scrapped in 1971.

The Soviet Union’s Tupolev Tu-144 made its maiden flight just two months before Concorde.

Just three more Concordes were made after this one. It flew from 1978 to 2003.

Even though Concorde is a relic of the past, I liked how the differing logos showed how it lasted for decades, from the meticulous font of the 1960s to the bold and minimalist Air France logo of the early noughties.

Pepsi spent $500 million on a huge rebranding effort in 1996, adopting its blue color scheme.

Sierra Delta, as it is known for the last two letters of its registration, was painted blue for two weeks in April of that year. The wings were kept white due to concerns over the fuel temperature.

Air France needed special permission because the Concorde was only certified to be painted white, as darker colors tend to retain more heat.

They were behind glass, so I couldn’t sit down and test one out. I already knew Concorde was relatively small inside, with its four-abreast layout, but I was still surprised that these seats wouldn’t look out of place on one of today’s regional airliners.

Concorde could carry between 92 and 128 passengers, depending on the layout.

Walking through, I was again slightly taken aback by the low ceiling. Concorde’s cabin height was just 6 feet 5 inches — an inch shorter than an Embraer E175 and 10 inches shorter than a Boeing 737.

Caviar, lobster, and Champagne weren’t uncommon.

It was another reminder that Concorde is a vestige of a past “golden era” of luxury flying.

In July 2000, a Concorde crashed shortly after takeoff when it ran over debris on the runway, and tyre fragments ruptured a fuel tank. All 109 people on board were killed, as well as four people in the hotel it crashed into.

As the investigation went on, all Concordes were grounded until November 2001.

Concorde only stayed in service for another two years, with British Airways retiring its final one in October 2003.

While the crash damaged the plane’s image, Concorde’s ultimate undoing was its huge operating costs.

Its four engines burned huge amounts of fuel. Plus, its routes were limited by opposition to noisy sonic booms.

The economics have since become notorious in the aviation industry.

For example, after postponing its plans for a hydrogen-powered plane, Airbus CEO Guillaume Faury said in April that it wouldn’t be competitive enough with other jets and hence risked becoming “a Concorde of hydrogen.”

Denver-based Boom Supersonic has been developing a new supersonic jet called Overture. It’s smaller than Concorde, expected to carry between 60 and 80 passengers, and would fly slightly slower at Mach 1.7.

China’s state-owned planemaker, Comac, is also developing a supersonic airliner called the C949, although few details are available.

Boom announced in February that the flight didn’t produce a sonic boom that was audible from the ground.

It dubbed this “Boomless Cruise” and is thanks to a physics term called Mach cutoff. Esssentially, if the sound barrier is broken at a high enough altitude, the sound waves can essentially U-turn in the atmosphere before reaching the ground.

Then, in June, President Donald Trump issued an executive order directing the Federal Aviation Administration to repeal a 52-year-old law that limited flight speeds over land, so long as there’s no sonic boom audible from the ground.

Boom says Overture could connect New York to London in just three hours and 45 minutes — almost twice as fast as current airliners.

It hopes to start carrying passengers in 2029.