Aviation Study Tour Blog

I don?t know where I was when the Air France Concorde crashed in Paris, but I do know where I was today: on board the world?s only supersonic passenger aircraft as it was parked at the Museum of Flight in Seattle.

The temptation was strong to say: ?that was one small step for man. But, one giant leap backwards for mankind?, when I stepped off the aircraft.

It?s hard to think of past examples where human beings had the technology to progress, but held back.

We went to the moon and now we are on our way to Mars. We went across the Atlantic Ocean on the Concorde in 2 hours, 52 minutes and 59 seconds?, and now we can?t any more. It doesn?t make sense.

When the British and French government decided to commission a supersonic passenger aircraft in 1952, the engineers had no idea how such a thing might be achieved. Sure, they had jet fighter aircrafts flying up in the stratosphere at twice the speed of speed, but these were flown by young men with G ? suits.

Boeing state that the technological challenge of making a Mach 2.0 passenger aircraft was greater than putting a man on the moon. Those engineers get all teary eyed about their beloved Saturn Vs. But, when the Concorde is mentioned, their eyes dry and they nod, slowly and reverentially.

That?s because life beyond the 750 miles per hour sound barrier is hostile. There?s the friction which generates heat, which results in the aircraft expanding by 6 inches.

There?s a spot on the dash that, in flight, is so hot that you could fry an egg on it!

Then, there?s the shock waves, that jams the hydraulics and freezes the controls.

Towards the end of World War II, pilots who put their Spitfires into a dive often lost control and could not pull up. They didn?t know at the time, but a supersonic shock wave preventing the ailerons from moving. To get an aircraft to fly through the sound barrier the shock wave has to be tamed.

To make things even more complicated, there?s the bothersome business of fuel consumption and reliability.

A typical flighter aircraft of the 1960 was out of fuel after 45 mintues. And it needed up to two weeks of maintenance after a sortie.

The Americans failed with their Supersonic Transport because they aimed for Mach 3.0 and the exotic materials needed to withstand the heat at this speed weren?t commercially available back then. The Russians were more realistic with their Tupolov, but it failed because it only had a range of 1500 miles.

It?s worst remembering that Concorde was built by trail and error after error.

Make no mistake, Concorde was an extraordinary technological achievement. Almost certainly, one of the greatest.

And not just technically, but politically. France and Britian couldn?t even agree on how it should be spelt. They finally decided that it should end in an ?e?, in the French style, but then things happened and they dropped the letter.

It was Tony Benn, the then secretary of state for industry, who solved the matter by declaring there would be ?e? for England, ?e? for Europe and ?e? for entente cordiale.

Benn saved Concorde over and over again. He even had to fight the Americans who tried to ban the aircraft on the grounds that its sonic boons would knock over their cows.

They kicked up such a stink that, bit by bit, the world began to lose confidence in the aircraft. One by one, the sixteen airlines that had ordered Concorde began to cancel until just two were left: Air France and British Airways.

Knowing that the plane was destined to be a commercial disaster, Benn had to cajole the Treasury and the French until, the scheduled services began. For the first time, paying passengers could fly so fast they could watch the sun rise in the west and arrive in America before they left home.

The cost to the British taxpayer was astronomical: $3.9 billion. Even in today?s money, that would nearly get you two football stadiums.

Even though this exotic plane arrived as Freddie Laker (founder of the low cost airline) began to take the working classes for $180, it regularly flew three ? quarters full and made $60 million a year for British Airways.

Usually, in an accident of this kind, we mourn the people who died.

But this time it was different. For the first time since Titantic we mourned the loss of the machine itself.

The great white dart was not invincible after all.

No company or government in the world is currently undertaking serious work on a supersonic aircraft.

There?s talk of Gulfstream building a Mach 2.0 business jet, but that?s about it and there are whispers about a spaceaircraft that could get from London to Sydney in two hours. But when the proposed cost of such a thing worked out at $27 billion, they decided not to.

Do you think Columbus would have reached America if he had concerned himself with the bottom line? Do you think Armstrong would have walk on the moon or Hillary on top of Everest?

Compounding the problem is a sense that the first world has pulled so far ahead of the third, the money would be better spent helping others to catch up. For every dollar spent on human advancement, there are a thousand bleeding hearts saying the money could have been spent on the starving in Africa. I see their point.

But what I can?t see is the human thirst for improvement being extinguished by the bean counters. No individual company or country could afford to develop an aircraft that?s significantly better than Concorde, so maybe what?s needed is a ring ? fenced global fund for the greater good. A fund that undertakes the work business won?t touch, hunting the skies for asteroids, searching the seas to find a cure for cancer and fuelling our quest to go faster and faster.

Or maybe the days of mechanical speed are over. Why go to the United Kingdom or America at the speed of sound when, with an internet connection and video conferencing, you can be there at the speed of light? Why go at all?

Maybe planes are about to follow in the footsteps of the horse. When the car came along, the horse didn?t go away. It simply stopped being a tool and became a toy.

If you can communicate instantly with anyone anywhere, the only reason to travel is for fun, for your holidays. And given the choice of doing that at Mach 2.0 or for $6, I know which I would choose.