In 1962, British and French engineers began sketching what would end up known as the Concorde. They were not merely designing an aircraft. They were making a statement. America had the Apollo program. The Soviet Union had Sputnik. Europe, fractured and bruised by two world wars, needed its own technological triumph, something that would prove that it too could defy gravity, that it too could stand at the forefront of modernity.
A supersonic passenger jet was the answer. It would be the fastest commercial airplane in history, crossing the Atlantic in just over three hours, going from Paris to New York faster than the sun itself. It was an engineering challenge as much as it was a vision of a future that felt inevitable.
But there was a problem.
That future never came.
By the time Concorde finally got off the ground in 1976, it met a different world. The oil crisis made fuel prices untenable. And Boeing’s new 747 was much more efficient. Concorde carried 100 passengers, while the 747 could haul 400. Concorde guzzled fuel as the 747 sipped it. Concorde was exclusive, luxurious, elite. The 747 was democratic.
Despite all of this, Concorde flew for 27 years. Not because it made sense, but because no one could admit that it didn’t.
The Cost of Admitting Failure
The sunk cost fallacy is a mental trap where the more we invest in something (time, money, energy), the harder it becomes to walk away, even when it’s clearly a bad deal. Instead of cutting our losses, we chase them.
When a gambler is down $5,000 at the blackjack table, he doubles down.
A company that has poured millions into a failing product convinces itself that with just a little more money, just a little more time, success is still possible.
A government, having spent billions on a supersonic airplane that is too expensive, too loud, too impractical, refuses to let it die.
In fact, the term “Concorde Fallacy” comes from this very project. Governments kept throwing money at the Concorde not because it was a good idea, but because they couldn’t bear the humiliation of walking away.
This is how it happens. This is how bad decisions survive. Not because they make sense, but because the alternative (admitting we were wrong) is too painful to bear.
Cognitive Dissonance at 60,000 Feet
In When Prophecy Fails, Leon Festinger recalled infiltrating a doomsday cult. The cult believed on December 21, 1954, a flood would destroy much of the world. When the day arrived, and no flood came, you might think the cult members would have abandoned their beliefs. But they didn’t.
They doubled down.
They convinced themselves that their prayers had saved the world, that the apocalypse had been postponed. The human mind, Festinger discovered, is not wired for self-correction. When faced with evidence that contradicts our beliefs, we don’t change course. We rationalize.
Governments are no different.
By the time Concorde was operational, everyone knew it was a failure. The fuel costs were astronomical. The operating expenses were absurd. But the British and French governments had spent 15 years and billions of dollars building the world’s first supersonic passenger plane. To cancel it would have been an admission that it was all for nothing.
And so, instead of shutting it down, they rebranded it.
A Plane for the Elite
Concorde was no longer about speed. It was about status.
They lined the cabin with fine leather and polished wood. They served lobster and caviar. They charged thousands of dollars for a one-way ticket and made sure that the people flying Concorde were the kinds of people who didn’t ask about ticket prices.
It became a luxury experience. A plane for celebrities, CEOs, and rock stars. Princess Diana. Sting. Mick Jagger. Phil Collins famously performed at Live Aid in London and Philadelphia on the same day, thanks to the Concorde.
For years, that illusion was enough.
Until, one day, it wasn’t.
The Day It Ended
On July 25, 2000, Air France Flight 4590 was in the middle of a takeoff roll at Charles de Gaulle Airport. Five minutes earlier, a departing McDonnell Douglas DC-10-30 dropped a 17 inch titanium alloy wear strip on the runway. Concorde ran over it at high speed. The tire exploded. A shard of rubber, traveling at 310 miles per hour, shot up into the undercarriage and punctured a fuel tank.
Flames erupted.
Toshihiko Sato/Associated Press
The plane struggled into the air for less than a minute before plummeting into a hotel in the town of Gonesse. All 109 people on board died.
The accident didn’t immediately kill the Concorde program. But it broke the illusion.
After being grounded for over a year, the planes were modified and returned to service. But it was clear that the world had moved on. The attacks of September 11, 2001 had made commercial aviation an entirely different industry. Luxury air travel no longer seemed like an aspiration. It seemed like an extravagance. A relic of a different time.
By 2003, Concorde was retired. The grand experiment was over.
The Real Cost of the Concorde
The Concorde is not an aviation story. It’s a story about how we make decisions.
We tell ourselves that we are rational creatures. That we weigh costs and benefits. That we adjust our thinking when new information arrives. But we don’t. We hold on to bad ideas because we don’t want to feel like we wasted our time. We stay in bad relationships because we’ve already invested years into them. We keep dead-end jobs because we can’t stomach the thought of “starting over.”
We double down when we should walk away.
The Concorde is proof that even the smartest people (scientists, engineers, world leaders) fall into this trap. The most rational solution was clear: Concorde should have been shut down before it ever entered service. But that’s not how human nature works.
And that’s why we need stories like this. Because at some point, we will all face our own Concorde moment when we have to decide whether to keep going or cut our losses.
The past is already spent. The only rational decision is about the future. And sometimes, the smartest thing we can do—the bravest thing we can do—is admit that we were wrong.
And walk away.