British Airways (BA) said it suspended its Concorde flights after U.K. and French aviation authorities said they would recommend on Wednesday that the flying certificate of the supersonic plane be suspended.

The airline said it was too early to say whether the supersonic planes, which began service in 1976, would every fly again.

"It’s too soon to speculate," said BA spokesman John Lampl." We won’t know anything until the morning when the British CAA (Civil Aviation Authority) tells us what the new information is."

But analysts are beginning to hear the death rattle of this technological dinosaur.

"They will have to heavily discount airfare or hope people won’t remember all of this," said Richard Aboulafia, director of aviation at the Teal Group, an aviation consultancy in Fairfax, Va. "Unfortunately the people who fly on the Concorde are sharp and have long memories."

He said there was one historical precedent for an airliner having been pulled because of its airworthiness and then put back in service. The Federal Aviation Administration withdrew the flying rights for McDonnell Douglas Corp’s DC10 following an accident in Chicago that killed 275 people in 1979.

Although the same scenario could happen with the Concorde, Aboulafia said that both British Airways and Air France will have an uphill battle with flier’s perception of the aircraft.

"Remember, this aircraft still has 1950s and 1960s technology," he said.

"What the British authorities have done today is to say that the plane cannot fly, which indicates to me what they heard from French authorities was probably catastrophic" said Joe Brancatelli, a columnist for biz.travel.com.

~

Brancatelli said that when an aircraft’s certification is withdrawn, it costs a tremendous amount of time and money to get it recertified.

"Putting a plane down of any kind is serious," he said.

The impact of permanently grounding the Concorde is not expected to be devastating to the balance sheet of either airline.

"It’s a marginal loss of income that can be made up easily," Brancatelli said. Currently, BA and Air France only fly a few aircraft daily to the United States.

The real loser in all of this?

"French pride," Brancatelli said.

Over the years, repairing and maintaining the aircraft has been an ongoing challenge because there was no second-generation Concordes to replace it.

Only 16 Concorde aircraft have been built at about $42 million a plane. British Airways and Air France operated 12 of those recently, cannibalizing parts from the other grounded planes.

For every hour of flight, the Concorde requires eight hours of maintenance – four times more than an Airbus aircraft. And, because the aircraft can only accommodate 128 passengers at a time, it had to keep ticket prices high to make a profit.

"Giving the Concorde a 50-50 chance of surviving is being generous," Aboulafia said. And, the likelihood of similar aircraft taking its place is slim because of the huge expense it takes to build and maintain such a high-tech fleet.

"For the same reason NASA’s budget continues to be cut, we will not see another Concorde," he said.

Investigators believe the initial cause' of the July 25 accident was a metal strip that punctured a tire, sending pieces of rubber into the fuel tanks. The French ministry said it would be premature to resume Concorde flights given the number of unanswered questions.

The crash was the first fatal accident involving the elite Concorde in its 25 years of commercial flying.

Eddington said Tuesday that "we were notified this morning by the (Britain’s Air Accident Investigation Branch) that, in the light of latest information available to it, it and its French counterparts, the BEA, would tomorrow recommend that the certificate of airworthiness for the aircraft should be suspended."

British Airways had grounded one of its Concordes the day before the Air France crash because small cracks spotted on the plane's wings had grown larger.

Engineers had detected 2-inch cracks on the wings of all the airline's Concordes months earlier, but the airline said the planes were still safe to fly. Investigators dismissed any link between the cracks on the British planes and the Air France crash.

Eddington said that since the Air France crash, British Airways has "implemented an extensive series of additional procedures and checks on the aircraft's airframe, engines, tires and wheels, hydraulics and other systems."

Also Tuesday, the Accident and Inquiry Office, which is conducting the crash investigation, said experts were still trying to determine the cause of the crash. A preliminary report is expected at the end of August.

The study of the fragmented plane has been slowed because investigators have detected small amounts of asbestos in its motors, and workers have been ordered to take extra health precautions, investigators said Tuesday. Older planes' motors often contain asbestos.