Air traffic controller Steve James has been working with Concorde all his life, yet the sight of the sleek supersonic plane taking off never fails to move him. But the end is nigh.

The Anglo-French jet dubbed ?Speedbird One? by controllers, the only supersonic passenger aircraft in the world, will on Friday retire from service after 27 years whisking the well-heeled across the Atlantic at twice the speed of sound.

?To see it arrive on Friday for the very last time will be a sad day for us. It is like losing a friend, and a rather beautiful friend at that,? James, general manager of Air Traffic Services at Heathrow, said as Concorde thundered past. Conceived in the early 1960s as a joint project between Paris and London, the arrow-shaped airliner first took to the skies commercially in 1976.

The French Concorde 001, took the first fare-paying passengers in January that year from Paris to Rio de Janeiro with the British Concorde 002 lifting off at the same time from London to Bahrain. Four months later both aircraft landed at the same time at Dulles airport in Washington.

But already the writing was on the wall for the fuel guzzler. Of an initial plan to make 300 Concordes, only 16 were manufactured, two as prototypes and only 14 flew commercially.

Considered for years as the safest airliner in the world, Concorde?s immaculate image was mauled in July 2000 when an Air France model crashed in flames on takeoff from Paris, killing everyone on board. Both fleets were grounded for more than a year for major safety refits.

Jeremy Lovell