Once Concorde went live it was making an operating profit of £30-50 million a year. Clearly it wasn’t going to pay off the investment, but it didn’t make sense

Once Concorde went live it was making an operating profit of £30-50 million a year. Clearly it wasn’t going to pay off the investment, but it didn’t make sense to retire it while it was making some profit to recoup on the losses. During development it was assumed that demand would be much higher, so you can only say that they should have stopped with hindsight. To be honest the value proposition seemed pretty good on paper - half the journey time for 20% more cost compared to a first class ticket, at a time where first class was the market trajectory.