Operation

The air companies British Airways and Air France got serial planes 5 and 6 to start regular commercial flights. Beginning from January 21, 1976  these two Concord planes were used for regular passenger flights Paris – Rio-de-Janeiro and London-Bahrain. Both air companies  started their flights to the international Dulles airport, Washington, USA   on May 24, 1976, though there had been a lot of environmental protests  on both coasts of the Atlantic Ocean. Concord’s future was dubious. Scientists’ research showed  that just a year of  500 Concord planes flying  at the height of the ozone layer (20-25 km) would result in irreversible process with high risk of  the Earth biosphere destruction. There are other drawbacks of such planes, one of them is supersonic flights limitation as a powerful acoustic stroke accompanying a supersonic flight is forbidden above populated territories. The system TDRF “Olymp” 593-1 were more noisy than even NK-144 installed on Tu-144 planes. This feature was the reason that some countries, the USA and Japan were the first ones among them, banned Concords’ flights over their territories. At first 16 airlines ordered 74 Concords, but later in March 1973 they cancelled their orders. The cancellation was caused as well by high price of the planes  and their servicing.16(18) Concords were built  during the period of 9 years. 5 of them belonged to the English company British Airways, 4 – to the French one  Air France, 7 were added later. But on October 17, 1977 the Supreme Court of the USA annulled the New York airport authorities ban  on Concord flights, which solved a number of problems.  At the end of 1977 commercial flights between New York and London were started, since  January 1978 they have taken place every day.  In December 1977 the airline London-Singapore started using Concord by joined operating of British Airways and Singapore Airlines. New destinations appeared, such as Caracas, Rio-de-Janeiro and Dakar. During first years Concord servicing expenses werе  covered by the Governments of France and Great Britain. The reason was  the rapid discovery of the fact that  the planes consume a huge amount of fuel (and in the 1970 s the energy crisis broke out), their servicing is expensive, that is why they are unprofitable and prices of Concord tickets are extremely high. As a result the plane load index decreased to 0,4 and air companies had to stop flights to South America, Africa and Asia. Most flights are confined to the USA destination.