The final scheduled flights of the British Airways Concorde brought an end to the era of supersonic passenger service that began on 21 Jan 1976. The Air France Concorde service had ended on 31 May 1976. The two airlines had previously made simultaneous announcements on 10 Apr 2003 that the SSTs were to be retired. Rising fuel and maintenance costs (in the shadow of a fatal crash of a French Concorde in 2000) at a time of declining passenger traffic and revenue had made the decision unavoidable.

The MacRobertson Trophy Air Race with a prize of over $75,000 starts from RAF Mildenhall in East Anglia to Flemington Racecourse, Melbourne, aircraft entered from all over the world including America, Holland, Argentina. New Zealand, Australia and more. The race was over 11,000 miles with stops at at Baghdad, Allahabad, Singapore, Darwin and Charleville, Queensland. A British built de Havilland DH.88 Comet piloted by C.W.A. Scott, T. Campbell Black won the race with an elapsed time of 71hr 0 .