The Concorde program ended not with a crash but with an accountant's memo. Air France and British Airways retired the fleet in 2003 after the July 2000 Paris accident — caused by a titanium strip shed from a Continental Airlines DC-10 — had cratered passenger confidence and made the already marginal economics untenable. Solomon Islands has no territorial connection to supersonic aviation; this is a commemorative issued squarely for the collector market, one of hundreds of gold-plated iron pieces the island nation licenses annually through overseas minting agencies.
The Concorde program ended not with a crash but with an accountant's memo. Air France and British Airways retired the fleet in 2003 after the July 2000 Paris accident — caused by a titanium strip shed from a Continental Airlines DC-10 — had cratered passenger confidence and made the already marginal economics untenable. Solomon Islands has no territorial connection to supersonic aviation; this is a commemorative issued squarely for the collector market, one of hundreds of gold-plated iron pieces the island nation licenses annually through overseas minting agencies.