All but one of the 20 Concordes are accounted for. Here’s what happened to the missing plane

There were many adjectives, superlatives and descriptions thrown at Concorde during its 27 years in the heavens. “Fast” was one of them. And “supersonic” was a word that it, in effect, came to claim as its own.

But most of all, it had grace – and a graceful symmetry which, more than two decades on from its retirement, makes it immediately and thrillingly recognisable: those vast, broad wings creating a sleek airborne triangle; that distinctive pointed nose cone and retracting visor giving it an almost quizzical expression.

There was a symmetry, too, to its fleet. Not for Concorde the mass-market dominance of the Boeing 747, with its 1,574 models off the production line – nor the ubiquity of the A320, and its 11,918 members of the club (and counting). This Anglo-French sophisticate was an exclusive beast – only 20 Concordes were ever crafted. Round-number perfection.

Twenty is also an easy statistic to keep track of. It is difficult to lose count when the number is so low – and tricky to overlook something of which there are so few examples.

In the case of Concorde, the whereabouts of all 20 planes are known and documented.

Sixteen of them, including the two prototypes, are on display in museums or airports around the world – from UK institutions such as Brooklands Museum at Weybridge in Surrey and the National Museum of Flight in East Lothian to US hotspots like the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center at Dulles Airport in Washington DC and the Intrepid Museum, on the bank of the Hudson in New York.

Two Concordes, meanwhile, are in storage – one at Heathrow Airport (it sits just off Runway 27L, visible to passengers on relevant departing flights), one at Grantley Adams Airport in Barbados (at a “Concorde Experience” that, at present, is closed to the public).

And one Concorde, infamously, is no more: F-BTSC, which flew in Air France livery, and fell to earth just after take-off from Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport, on July 25 2000.

Keen mathematicians will already have noted that 16 plus two plus one is a simple sum. And that it adds up to 19.

Which begs a question: If it is not in a museum or storage, and it did not crash, then what became of the 20th Concorde? It is a question worth asking, too. Because, while the whereabouts of the plane are known and documented, its story – which reached its desultory conclusion 30 years ago this month, in March 1995 – has gone (largely) untold.

For all their elegance, several of the Concordes were high-speed workhorses. G-BOAC (now the main attraction at Manchester Airport’s Runway Visitor Park; see here) logged 22,260 flying hours in a 28-year career which lasted from February 1975 to October 2003.

The trajectory was roughly similar for, in ascending order, G-BOAB (in storage at Heathrow; 22,296 flying hours, between May 1976 and August 2000), G-BOAA (in East Lothian; 22,768 flying hours between November 1975 and August 2000), G-BOAE (the Barbados Concorde; 23,376 flying hours between March 1977 and November 2003) and G-BOAD (at the Intrepid Museum, New York; 23,397 flying hours from August 1976 to November 2003).

As the G-prefix to their registration numbers hints, all of these Concordes were part of the (Great) British Airways fleet. Their Air France siblings were a little less active. Of the 10 planes with an F-prefix registration, only F-BVFA (now at Dulles Airport; 17,824 flying hours from October 1975 to June 2003) logged more than 15,000 hours in the sky.

Then there was F-BVFD. If not quite the runt of the litter, it was an outlier in what was otherwise a global success. Of the 14 production Concordes that entered full commercial service (seven for BA, seven for Air France), it was by far the most under-used, chalking up just 5,814 off-ground hours in an abridged career that barely reached its fifth birthday.

F-BVFD’s first flight was on February 10 1977; its final one on May 27 1982. To put this in context, the second of the 14 production Concordes to retire, F-BVFF (now displayed next to Terminal 3 at Charles de Gaulle), managed 12,421 flying hours, beginning in December 1978. And it did not touch down for the last time until June 11 2000 – a month before its colleague F-BTSC crashed, and effectively brought the Concorde era to an end.

So what happened to F-BVFD? Why was it the underachiever of a very fabulous family?

The answer lies in a relatively forgotten corner of the Air France timetable, and specifically, on a West African runway, on November 28 1977 – little more than a year after Concorde had left the hangar to become aviation’s finest hour and its high tidemark.

The popular recollection of Concorde, and of the various cities it called upon, tends to cling to the transatlantic greatest hits: the Air France hop from Paris to New York – or, in the case of G-BOAD and its record-breaking crossing of two hours 52 minutes and 59 seconds on February 7 1996 – the British Airways service from the Big Apple to London.

Less remembered – to an extent – are BA’s flights to Bahrain and Singapore, and that the Air France fleet made regular visits to Central and South America: to Mexico City, to Caracas, and to Rio de Janeiro.

While supersonic flights to the Venezuelan capital sound preposterous in the present day (Air France flew there almost from the off, with the first Concorde flight departing on April 10 1976), the four-and-a-half-hour jaunt down to Brazil’s most iconic dot on the map was a staple part of its supersonic schedule. Indeed, Rio was the inaugural Air France Concorde destination – the ticker-tape departure when the airline and its British ally jointly unleashed their supersonic baby on January 21 1976.

For all that Concorde treated the Atlantic with such nonchalance that it might have been skipping over a puddle, the Air France route to Rio did make a stop on the way – in Dakar, the capital of Senegal. And it was here that F-BVFD’s journey to obscurity began, with a landing so heavy on that day in November 1977 that its tail-wheel was crushed.

F-BVFD hit the tarmac at 14 metres a second rather than its proscribed limit of 10, and in the moments directly after this touchdown, dragged its rear fuselage along the ground.

It was cleared to fly on, and continued to go about its business for nearly five years. But when a later inspection revealed significant structural issues caused by this misjudged landing, its days were numbered. And geo-political circumstances were not in its favour.

In 1982, Venezuela entered its steep spiral of decline, and with the Latin American routes proving less economically worthwhile than the headline act to New York, Air France ceased its Concorde services to Mexico City, Caracas and Rio. This meant fewer flights – and the cold reality that the airline required fewer Concordes to meet its commitments.

In the November of that year, two of its seven supersonic planes were relieved of their duties – initially for restoration. The second of the pair was the doomed F-BTSC, which returned to the roster in April 1986, and flew with little incident until the crash in 2000. F-BVFD faced a slower fate. Already grounded as of the May (1982), it was deemed to have been too harmed by its African misadventure for full repair to be financially viable.

Its demise was torturous. Over the next 12 years, it was cannibalised for parts, its vital organs either ripped out and transplanted to its teammates, or sold to British Airways for the same purpose. By 1994 it was a corroded shell, a decade of being left exposed to the elements at Charles de Gaulle having taken its toll. What remained was broken up for scrap in 1994, although the final indignity came in March 1995, when the nosecone was detached and shipped to a US collector for a reported 300,000 Francs (around £30,000).

If you look carefully, you can spot its ghost. Its exhaust cowlings – key to the ingenuity of those supersonic engines – are an exhibit at the Farnborough Air Sciences Museum in Hampshire. And if you ever catch a flight from Le Bourget Airport, you might notice F-BVFD gleaming in the Gallic sunshine. A bit of it, at any rate.

What was once Paris’s main aviation hub (although it sits just outside the city, some seven miles to the north-east) closed its runway to scheduled flights in 1980. But amidst the air shows and formation displays that have become its stock in trade, it still welcomes private jets.

Glance through one of these privileged windows, towards the south-west corner of the airfield, and your eye may alight on a cluster of antique planes and artefacts whose random slabs of disembodied metal include part of F-BVFD’s fuselage; nominally as part of the collection at the airport’s Musée de l’Air et de l’Espace.

Nor is F-BVFD alone in having this particular address. Le Bourget is also home to two of the 16 on-display Concordes – one of the prototypes, F-WTSS, plus its Air France friend F-BTSD, which rode the tail-winds almost until the end (its final flight was on June 14 2003).

Over in a nearby hangar, meanwhile, lie the remnants of F-BTSC, four miles from where it crashed in Gonesse. With Concorde, there is always a symmetry – even in death.

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