The problem for Concorde is that there was/is very little need for really high speed travel and very few pax were paying the fares required to keep the flight commercial. The problem was that seats on Concorde were about the WT+ seats you get today despite costing a premium over F fares.

Concorde was kept flying purely for "flagship and national pride" purposes but by 2003, there was very few spare parts left and it was expensive to manufacture the parts on a very limited basis for the few planes left flying. BA began cannibalising parts from the planes that they had but were not flying.

It was no longer commercially viable. I believe that the decision to abandon Concorde would have been the same irrespective of the AF disaster.

We were fortunately to fly Concorde from LHR-JFK on a Miles redemption back in May 2002 (from credit card spending, Sainsbury shopping, etc - this was well before the days I travelled for work) before the announcement that Concorde could stop. It was a Friday flight and in terms of pax, I think Versace paid for about 7/8 full fare tickets for Donatella and her entourage.

I am fairly certain that the rest of the front cabins were mainly leisure pax on discounted or redemption tickets. Why? We were the first pax to ask the crew to take a picture of us in our seats when there was a sudden rush of 5 other cameras being thrust at the poor crew member.

Could not see the back cabin any how busy it was.