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Museums to get French Concordes
LONDON, England -- Air France is to donate its fleet of five Concordes to a museum after they go into retirement later this year. The supersonic jets will be handed over to museums in the U.S., Germany and France, the company said in a statement Wednesday. Air France and British Airways said in April they were decommissioning the planes as a result of the escalating costs in running the jets. Rising maintenance costs, excessive fuel consumption and waning demand for the $7,000 tickets have forced the companies to retire the 27-year-old planes. The museums to benefit will be the U.S. National Air and Space Museum in Washington; the Technik Museum in Speyer, Germany; the French Air & Space Museum at Le Bourget; and an air museum being built by planemaker Airbus in Toulouse, southern France. The fifth, which has just been overhauled, is scheduled to go on display at Paris' Charles de Gaulle airport. "In doing this, Air France wishes to allow as many people as possible to see this legendary aircraft, which has made its mark not just on Air France, but on aviation history," it said. British entrepreneur Richard Branson has expressed interest in buying British Airways's fleet of the 100-seater planes for his Virgin Atlantic Airways, but the British airline said it too would rather donate the aircraft to museums. Branson said he wanted to buy the seven jets for £1 ($1.57). But BA said the fleet was "not for sale." Virgin said it planned to ask British Airways for "full operating figures" to see if the slender needle-nosed passenger jets can be kept in the air after BA and Air France said they would retire their fleets in October. "If having examined the figures, Virgin Atlantic, with its lower cost base, believes it can make a success of it, we will be asking British Airways to give us the planes for the same price that they were given them for -- one pound,'' Branson said in a statement. But British Airways said the successors to the joint Anglo-French manufacturers, Airbus, would not allow any other airlines than BA and Air France to fly the prestigious plane. "Concorde will have a fantastic last six months in various countries around the world," promised a BA spokesman. Twenty Concordes in all were built by Airbus's predecessors, Aerospatiale of France and British Aircraft Corporation, the jet entering commercial service from 1976. The British and French governments gave the planes away to their national carriers after spending more than $34 billion at 2003 prices on the development of the planes. A round trip on Concorde from Paris or London to New York can cost as much as $10,000. But an economic slowdown, war and terrorism have conspired to plunge the airline industry into its worst crisis in decades. Concorde also suffered a blow to its prestige when 113 people died as an Air France Concorde crashed near Paris in July 2000. Air France Chief Executive Jean-Cyril Spinetta said: "Recently, we were filling only about 20 percent of the seats.'' Billionaire Branson attempted to buy several of Air France's Concordes a few years ago, French newspaper Le Monde said. Branson's Virgin Group owns 51 percent of Virgin Atlantic, with Singapore Airlines owning the balance.
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