Concorde, the Anglo-French Supersonic Airliner, Photographed in 1975
Concorde in February 1975, the year before commercial service began. The aircraft was built by two governments under a treaty that contained no exit clause, and it never recovered its development cost — which is a fact about aviation policy rather than about engineering.
Britain and France signed the Concorde agreement in 1962 with no break clause, which is why neither could abandon it when the costs multiplied. The aircraft flew, beautifully, into a market that governments then closed: sonic-boom bans over land confined it to ocean routes, American cities fought its landing rights through the courts, and the airlines that had taken options walked away. The deregulated, cheap, subsonic industry that grew instead was the opposite of what the project assumed. The photograph is in the U.S. National Archives. See how supersonic flight challenged governance from Concorde to deregulation.
Public domain — source (Wikimedia Commons). Free to reuse under the stated licence.
