Clipped-Wing Concorde May Head to Dubai

Grounded supersonic plane might be permanently parked in the Gulf region right near the QE2

I don't usually indulge in speculative news, but the headline, "Concorde jet may become tourist attraction," on a news-oriented UK travel blog called Travel House UK did intrigue me. According to Travel House which in turn cited The Times, "a consortium is reportedly bidding to turn one of British Airways’ seven remaining Concorde supersonic jets into a tourist attraction, while BA said it was mulling its options." If the supersonic plane travels to Dubai, it will literally be by slow boat, its wings removed in order to fit it onto a ship, presumably to pass through the Suez Canal.

The word from "a source close to the Dubai consortium" is the group would spend millions in whatever currency to restore the interior of the plane that is currently mothballed at Heathrow Airport in London. I never flew on the Concorde, alas, but I think I sort of saw the aircraft through thick hedges when driving to or from the airport. But I'm not sure. Britain's grounded Concorde fleet is dispersed around the country and open to visitors.

Four decades ago, the supersonic Concorde, a collaborative project between Great Britain and France, was herald as the future of air travel. Beginning in 1976, British Airways and Air France few them, mainly for elite transatlantic travel. Only 20 ever came off the assembly line in Toulouse, with six used for future developments for a future that didn't happen and 14 operated commercially and, safely until July 2000, when a crash Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport that killed 113 people was the beginning of the end for all Concordes. British and French planes were all taken out of service in 2003. Crash or not, this SST would most likely not have survived the huge fuel cost run-up of 2008 and the global economic crisis that followed.

I wonder whether it will be considered a psychological blow to the Brits to have this plane parked under the palm trees on a fake island in a Persian Gulf state. At one point, there was talk of moving it from wherever it was behind the hedges to new Terminal 5 (T5), but if the Dubai plan comes to pass, the plane would be the second British transportation icon to end up on one of Dubai's artificial islands, along with the "QE2" which was moved there in order to repurpose it as floating luxury hotel there. However, according to recent reports, that project might also be in financial jeopardy and might also be opened just as a tourist attraction. Stay tuned.