Inside the Swanky (Now Defunct) Concorde Supersonic Jet

The first commercial Concorde flights took off on January 21, 1976. Two Concordes, each operated by one of the partner airlines that funded and developed the supersonic technology, departed simultaneously. Air France's jet set off from Paris to Rio de Janeiro via Senegal, and British Airways departed from London to Bahrain. Both planes featured designs that reflected their national identities and carried a message about a new kind of elevated air travel.

Watching the Concorde streak down the runway must have felt like watching the future arrive. It was not just exciting because of the plane’s engines (the four Rolls-Royce/Snecma Olympus 593 turbojet engines provided roughly twice the thrust of those in many subsonic airliners) or its Mach 2 cruising speed—faster than a speeding bullet!—which shortened the flight between Paris and New York to about three and a half hours.

The aircraft also made a statement with its design: a pointed, downturned nose that dropped to a steeper angle at takeoff and landing so the pilots could see the runway from the cockpit; small, triangular wings and a compact, sleek body. This was a promise of a beautiful and streamlined future.

To fashion the interiors of these aircraft of the future, Air France brought in Raymond Loewy, the “father of industrial design,” whose previous aerodynamic projects included a reimagining of Air Force One for President John F. Kennedy and a design for the interior of Skylab, NASA’s first space station. Just as Concorde pushed the boundaries of air travel, Loewy was the man who could break dreary legacy design barriers inside the plane.

His bold vision touched nearly everything in the passenger cabin—including the famous long-stemmed cutlery that passengers (including Andy Warhol) swiped for souvenirs. The cutlery was presented on tray tables designed by Loewy and accompanied by rectangular porcelain dishes, also designed by Loewy. To suggest a greater sense of space in the very narrow cabin, Loewy added a wide black stripe down the center of the plane’s ceiling.

The initial flight attendant uniforms—striped shirt dresses—were designed by the House of Jean Patou. Male stewards wore impeccable off-white uniforms and carried an extra suit in case of an unsightly mark or stain.

The highly sophisticated aircraft was too expensive to alter, so occasional visual updates were key to keeping the Concorde experience fresh. In 1985, Patou’s flight attendant uniforms were replaced by a silk crepe dress designed by Nina Ricci. That same year, Concorde’s interiors were refreshed by designer Pierre Gautier-Delaye, who oversaw a third redesign in 1988.

In 1994, French design star Andrée Putman was called upon to create a sensation of more space and light within the tight confines of the cabin. The narrow Concorde typically carried about 100 passengers. She reconfigured the overhead bins so they more closely followed the curve of the plane’s sides, a move that opened up space below for additional indirect lighting. Putman also chose a new, paler color palette to add airiness to the cabin and offset the signature dark blue of Concorde’s trademark, which appeared in the carpet design and traced the rim of the serving dishes.

Printed matter also played a role in Concorde’s prestigious visual impact: Fashion designer Christian Lacroix created five menu designs for Concorde in 1998. First-time Concorde passengers were handed certificates to show that they had experienced flight at Mach 2, and seatback pockets contained lavishly produced catalogs of Concorde merchandise available for sale in flight.

British Airways chose to distinguish its Concorde as a practical, business-focused service, presenting the planes as a highly efficient means of moving businesspeople around the world. For much of Concorde’s years of service, the airline offered twice-daily flights between New York and London, as opposed to the once-daily Air France flights between Paris and New York.

From the beginning, the interior design of the British Airways Concorde fleet was more discreet than that of Air France. To kit out its interiors, British Airways relied on its own design and marketing consultants at the London firm Negus & Negus, which designed the exterior for the newly formed airline in 1974, featuring a stylized red, white and blue Union flag on the tail. Mike Abrahams, a designer at Negus & Negus who created the original British Airways corporate identity, including many Concorde projects, says “most of the people who flew Concorde were business people who didn’t hang around the lounge. They’d get to the airport, get on the plane, get off the other end, do a meeting, turn around and come back.”

The BA menu offered a haute selection of European wines and a menu laden with elaborate dishes. Lobster and caviar were on the menu, but frequent supersonic fliers say the service itself was more focused on modest efficiency than gourmand pleasure.

The Concorde cabin crew, dressed in smart uniforms designed by Savile Row’s Hardy Amies, oversaw their 100 passengers in an interior space that was not unlike that of the rest of the BA fleet. The seats were upholstered in airline-standard cloth seats fitted with changeable covers printed in mod 1970s colors with patterned, horizontal bands.

The narrow fuselage of the plane meant just four seats per row—and those seats were surprisingly tight. “People could only tolerate them because the flight was only three and a half hours,” says Abrahams. It couldn’t have hurt, either, that above 45,000 feet turbulence was rarely an issue, so passengers could leave their seats and drink Veuve Clicquot with other beautiful people onboard.

Abrahams was charged with creating a catalog of the luxury goods available for sale onboard Concorde, but it was not the usual assignment. “Weight was a particularly important concern," he explains. "We’d normally use quite heavy and luxurious paper for this kind of job, but we had to use lighter stock because of our brief from BA. If you’ve got 100 brochures in seatback pockets, and they each weigh 250 grams instead of 135 grams, that heavy paper really added up. Everything for those planes had to be very carefully calculated.”

Neither British Airways nor Air France offered traditional onboard entertainment beyond the digital display mounted on the bulkhead in the front and rear cabins, which showed the plane’s current speed and altitude. Outside the unusually small windows, the curvature of the Earth was visible at cruising altitude, as was the dark purple edge of space. Instead of watching movies, people mingled with each other, making business deals. In 1983, the head of Perrier commissioned Andy Warhol on the spot to create a bottle label for the 150th anniversary of the mineral water company.

In 1999, Sir Terence Conran, working alongside British aviation design firm Factorydesign, oversaw the final interior redesign for the British Airways fleet. The $20 million upgrade went by the codename Project Rocket and used English touches throughout. Deep blue leather was chosen for the seats because it resembled an Aston Martin. Parting gifts handed to passengers included embossed leather notebooks from Smythson of Bond Street. Bland gray carpets were replaced by a pinstriped navy carpet. The china and flatware were made by historic firms such as Wedgwood and Royal Doulton.

The Project Rocket design team also devised a lighting effect to mark the moment when the plane reached the speed of sound: a subtle wash of blue light that moved from the front of the passenger cabin to the back.

Sir Terence Conran’s firm also oversaw the design update of the Concorde Airport Lounge at JFK and Heathrow, exclusive spaces for Concorde passengers to check in and wait to board while enjoying services and views of the plane being readied. The furniture and artwork of the lounge celebrated sophisticated modern tastes: Eames lounge chairs, Eileen Gray Bibendum chairs, Wilhelm Wagenfeld Bauhaus table lamps and Sol LeWitt murals.

The haute design, coupled with the thrilling view of the waiting Concorde—another landmark of 20th-century design—heightened the excitement of first-time Concorde passengers and confirmed the good taste of repeat customers. (The airport lounges continued to be used by British Airways long after the Concorde was retired.)

A catastrophic 2000 accident, which killed all 109 people on board an Air France Concorde, marked the beginning of the end for the era of supersonic commercial travel. That, followed by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and a period of belt-tightening by Airbus, a privatized British Airways and Air France, moved the remaining Concorde jets from active duty to museum exhibits. The Concorde made a final, ceremonial flight on November 26, 2003, from London's Heathrow to Filton, Bristol.

Designs inspired by the jets, though, continue to thrill. Concorde memorabilia, including full sets of that coveted and oft-pocketed Raymond Loewy flatware as well as in-flight menus and wine lists, ballpoint pens, corkscrews, luggage tags and leather-bound flasks, still command high-altitude prices at live auctions and on eBay.