You don’t need to hurry too hard on the 747. The 747-800 Intercontinental entered service only 2 years ago (Jun 2012), so you’ll likely be able to experience that for a while yet.
On the topic of the Concorde, my gift to myself for graduating from university and getting a ‘real job’ was going to be a trip on the Concorde. Unfortunately, I didn’t graduate until 2005. 
Same! About the only thing that compares is looking up at the sky at night and seeing the International Space Station float by. Connecting our boring terrestrial lives to amazing aerospace technology.
No fair! Why does everyone else get to live in Cornwall?
If it’s any consolation, I grew up there and since I wasn’t into the two main activities available to teenagers–surfing and drinking 2 litre bottles of cider under railway bridges–I couldn’t stand the place. It is nice to go back and visit though. Very pretty. When it’s not raining.
I only went for summer holidays, so I only have good memories 
(but yeah, rain). Dad’s from Penzance.
Top deck of a 747 is only good in the window seats where you get a bonus little locker between your seat and the window. The aisle seats suck because the floor is too flexy (like a tramampapoline) and the seats bounce and wake you up when people walk past. (First world problems, I know…)
Those who decry the “bean counters” in commercial aviation should note that even the world’s armed services – with very different price/performance metrics – procured only modest numbers of supersonic bombers, and have never seriously considered supersonic troop/cargo transports. The advent of ballistic missiles explains part of the former, true; but more broadly, it’s expensive to push even a fighter supersonic for what are usually combat or interception “dashes,” and really expensive to maintain supersonic cruise for anything bigger.
Similar hurdles of physics, aerodynamics, engineering and economics face every scheme for hypersonic “flyback” first stages in space technology, as in early SST designs. Yes, it would make orbital access much easier to use air-breathing engines to get to, say, Mach 8 @ 100,000 feet and “launch” a rocket stage from there…but if the much larger military and commercial aviation markets haven’t been willing to pay the R&D freight for a beast like that, what are the chances that the space market will?
That is one attractive aircraft
By most current First Class standards, the cabin was not all that luxurious. The seats were rather cramped and only had 38" pitch (similar to most Economy Plus sections today). There was no entertainment and not much room to stand up or walk around. For this you paid $15K.
One on display at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, the one at Dulles Airport
http://airandspace.si.edu/explore-and-learn/multimedia/detail.cfm?id=1137
What’s more, the 15,000 only pays for a three and half hour flight. If I’m going to fly over the atlantic, I want to enjoy the full seven hours.
Just 16 hours, rounded off by crash landing in a bog in Ireland.
A family friend took us to an air show when I was at school, before the rules about flying over crowds were tightened up. The very low pass overhead by an Avro Vulcan was one of the most visceral multi-sensory experience of my life. It wasn’t just loud —I could feel myself and the ground around me shaking and see it too. Plus the smell of aviation fuel … Then it banked away, pulled up hard and disappeared into the clouds.
At least you got the opportunity to try surfing. In my part of the West Country it was glue-sniffing and drinking 2L bottles of Scrumpy in the shadow of a slag heap … Needless to say I live elsewhere too.
had a similar experience but with the SR-71… when they decided to leave, poof, they were gone like that.
The British Empire spread across the whole planet because everyone hated the shitty town they grew up in.
One of the flight paths to JFK took the Concorde right over the campus of the community college I started going to in 1980. (Uniondale, Long Island.) I don’t think I saw it fly over more than a half a dozen times, but it was pretty cool!
Actually, you paid $15K for the vastly reduced flight time. You could argue that the time saved isn’t worth the cost, but that’s pretty subjective in the end.
I suppose it not yet too late to give yourself the present you had promised …
