The Concorde was the first major cooperative venture of European countries to design and build an aircraft. The origins of the project date to the early 1950s, when Arnold Hall, director of the Royal Aircraft Establishment asked Morien Morgan to form a committee to study the supersonic transport (SST) concept. The group met for the first time in February 1954 and delivered their first report in April 1955. In November of 1962, Britain and France finally agreed to share costs and risks in producing an SST. British Aerospace and the French firm Aérospatiale were responsible for the airframe, while Britain’s Rolls-Royce and France’s Société Nationale d’Étude et de Construction de Moteurs d’Aviation developed the jet engines.
At the time it was known that the drag at supersonic speeds was strongly related to the
span of the wing. This led to the use of very short-span, very thin rectangular wings such as those seen on the control surfaces of many missiles, or in aircraft like the Avro 730 that the team studied. The result was a technological masterpiece, the delta-wing Concorde. It had a maximum cruising speed of 2,179 km (1,354 miles) per hour, or Mach 2.04 (more than 2x the speed of sound), allowing the aircraft to reduce the flight time between London and New York to about three hours. The development costs of the Concorde were so great that they could never be recovered from operations, and the aircraft was never financially profitable. Nevertheless, it proved that European governments and manufacturers could cooperate in complex ventures, and it helped to ensure that Europe would remain at the technical forefront of aerospace development.