The fastest civil airliner, the Mach 2.5 Concorde was a marvel of modern engineering when teams from France and Great Britain began developing it in the 1960s, when it was widely thought that supersonic airliners would be the norm soon. That future never happened, and with the brief exception of the Soviet Tupolev SST, Concorde remained the sole supersonic civil airliner from its first passenger flight, in January of 1976, to its swan song in 2003. Its first appearance at Oshkosh in 1985 was a chance for hundreds of thousands of grassroots aviators to see the world’s fastest airliner up close while cementing EAA’s annual convention as a big-time event with broad appeal and a reach that spanned the globe.
