With the demise of Concorde and in the unlikely event of seeing a Virgin Airways logo on it's tail, you have to wonder what happened to supersonic transport or SST? The reason I ask is that I'm sitting in my garden in West London watching all these subsonic buses make their final approach into Heathrow and I'm thinking why so slow? What ever happened to the promise of mass supersonic transport as opposed to one for the ultra wealthy only? If like me you have to travel economy/standard/DVT class you will also probably find it an odious experience at the best of times. It's not the act of flying that I have trouble with or the belief as a friend of me does that passenger planes are 'evil birds fashioned from steel'. Its the sardine (or is it pilchard as they're the same fish you know) approach to cramming as many people in as possible. So who wouldn't want to get to New York in three hours from Heathrow rather than the traditional six? And hey it's not as if we don't have the technology. Back in the sixties that was the plan. By 1967 15 airlines had placed orders for more than 70 Concordes. Two proposed American SST's had even more between them, the Boeing 2707 and Lockheed 2000 had 114 firm orders from 26 different airlines. Analysts predicted that by 1985 there could be up to 900 supersonic passenger planes in service. They failed however to predict the fuel crisis and growing environmental concerns, so when Concorde finally made an appearance in 1976 the dream was effectively over. Add to this the Russian TU144 'Koncordski' crash at the 1973 Paris Air Show and the withdrawal of the two American programmes it couldn't get any worse. Well it did actually as only 20 Concordes made it off the production line. So is there any future for supersonic or the even faster hypersonic aircraft for commercial purposes. Probably not. The development costs are just too high. Both the Americans and Japanese have hypersonic aircraft designs on the drawing board and that's probably where they'll stay, Boeing's proposed next generation SST has been shelved after their partner NASA had it's budget slashed by Congress. As for Concorde it's savior may come in the bearded form of one R Branson who wants BA's Concordes now they don't. Branson reckons the aircraft have 20 years left in them but BA say they are now a financial liability. Not surprisingly BA are not willing to sell or give it's seven planes to Virgin although they got them for free and you can see why, it would be a PR disaster to see Virgin logos all over the an aircraft that BA have used to create it's core image. But why not give them to Branson? It they are such a financial blackhole Concorde could achieve what BA have failed to do by both fair means and fowl and bury Virgin. Next time you fly remember that if the analysts had got it right (of course that would have been a first) your journey could have been completed in half the time or even less.