We mark Europe Day by highlighting the geostrategic significance of the Azores Archipelago, exemplified by the 1971 Atlantic Summit held on Terceira Island, attended by Richard Nixon, President of the United States, and Georges Pompidou, President of France. The latter travelled in a Concorde, a supersonic passenger aircraft made possible by a Franco-British consortium. The large-scale aeronautical model on display today, built to a 1:24 scale, was gifted to the Museum of Angra do Heroísmo by the director of the aircraft’s manufacturing company, British Aeroespatiale. Today, it is also impossible to overlook the tragic end of the Concorde in commercial aviation, marked by the Paris disaster in July 2000.
