>>1272231Airbus was more unable than just refused. I understand Airbus more or less stated an overall figure for new parts, and both BA and AF just said "no". British Airways paid £1 for 3 concordes when Lufthansa, Pan Am and a few others just cancelled their Concorde orders. British Airways basically took the planes for free, but a symbolic payment had to be made for legal reasons. The British government basically paid for the aircraft.
Concorde was retired for 3 reasons:
1. spare parts were prohibitively expensive for the Concordes
2. cost for running Concordes were incredibly expensive, not just in fuel, but also for maintainance and also for landing fees (Concorde's noise levels and high wake turbulence were issues for airports)
3. Concorde was out of date: the flight engineer and outmoded flight deck made day to day operations more complex compared to more recent airliners both from Boeing and Airbus, mostly increasing running costs, but overall meant that BA and AF had to maintain flight engineers and maintenance crews for instruments, adding to running costs
There were also other contributing factors:
-Crew training was problematic, as the test pilots who taught the first captains and first officers were no longer around, making the training of new crew up to the airlines, meaning the retirement of training captains on the Concorde complicated things
-Concorde was seen as unsafe after AF4590, even though the exact cause was not directly Concorde's fault, the public opinion was shaped based on headlines
-Concorde was seen as a huge pollution issue, with the aircraft still spewing smoke on take off
-Concorde was not seen as a useful aircraft, but rather a plaything for the rich and famous and was generating negative PR with both BA and AF, as times changed and air travel overall got cheaper
While the contributing factors didn't lead to the retirement of Concorde, and most of them could have been worked around or just ignored. Costs were main factor here,
