CHANTILLY, Va. (AP) -- Air France turned the oldest of its Concordes over to the Smithsonian Institution Thursday for display near Washington's Dulles International Airport.
The 27-year-old aircraft, once seen as the future of passenger air travel, made the last of its 6,967 trips when it flew from Paris to Dulles.
The Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum already is home to the Wright Brothers' plane and the airplane Charles Lindbergh flew solo across the Atlantic.
The first of Air France's five Concordes went into service in January 1976. Its inaugural flight from Paris included stops in Dakar, Senegal, and Rio de Janiero, Brazil, and it remained in service for 17,824 flight hours.
``It was the ultimate flight experience, not just because it broke the sound barrier but also because it had its own distinctive atmosphere,'' said Air France chairman Jean-Cyril Spinetta.
``The thing that handicapped its whole career was not being able to fly over land because of the sonic booms,'' said Don Lopez, deputy director of the Smithsonian. The aircraft, developed in the 1960s as a joint project of the British and French governments, saw only limited production.
The Smithsonian will exhibit the plane inside the massive Stephen F. Udvar-Hazy Center, a display hangar the museum is building near Dulles, some 25 miles west of Washington. It will house key elements of the museum's collection that cannot fit in the existing building on the National Mall. The Concorde will go on public display Dec. 15, when the facility is opened to mark the centennial of the Wright Brothers' first powered flight at Kill Devil Hills, N.C.
A large space has already been roped off to accommodate the Concorde's 204-foot-long fuselage and huge, swept-back wings. It will be displayed near the U.S. Army Air Corps' Enola Gay, the B-29 Superfortress that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945.
Paris-to-Washington Concorde service began in May 1976, but those flights were suspended in November 1982. Service between Paris and New York ended last month. The aircraft's limited operations schedule was completely disrupted after the July 25, 2000, crash of an Air France Concorde on takeoff from Paris, which led to the suspension of all Concorde operations for 13 months.
British Airways plans to retire its seven Concordes in October.
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