Admittedly for a unique minority Concorde wasn't a novelty at all: the very few journalists who covered Washington and London global political developments (and who were indulged the budget) used Concorde more often than any red eye shuttle. I actually associate the atrocious decline in public US - UK understanding to this absurdity. The absurdity being how much we needed a humanist perspective on transatlantic relations after 9/11 but got informationally waterboarded instead by sheer volume of grade school quality wire release. The cost of running Speed Bird even a little longer for diplomatic corps reporting should have been a mutual national priority.