minus 60 Temperature in Celsius of the outside air at Concorde’s highest altitude, 60,000 feet
0 Number of female pilots and flight engineers employed on British Airways’ Concorde operation.
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.
2.33 Average daily hours flown by each BA Concorde in test and training flights as well as passenger operations. An Emirates Airbus A380 flies for over 12 hours.
3 Flight crew on Concorde: captain, first officer and flight engineer.
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 (1979).
48 Miles flown per ton of fuel; the Airbus A350 manages close to 200 miles, and carries three times as many passengers.
84 Wingspan in feet.
100 Number of passenger seats.
113 Deaths in the Concorde crash in Paris on 25 July 2000; four were on the ground, the remainder on the aircraft. The crash happened at 4.45pm, two minutes after take-off.
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-London flight, on 7 February 1996.
431 Opening return fare, in pounds, from London to Washington DC when the route began in May 1976.
4,500 Range in miles of Concorde.
9,179 Price in pounds of a return flight from London to New York on Concorde shortly before the aircraft was grounded.
