Let's continue to have a look at Every Jetliner Ever Made, but with Airbus and Boeing at the end otherwise it would be boring. This week, the sweet sadness of Concorde, which is pronounced Con-cord, snip-snip, like a pair of scissors.
CONCORDE (Great Britain (with assistance from France))
Technically this should be under A for Aérospatiale, or perhaps B for BAC, but I'm going to put it under C for Concorde because there's nothing quite like Concorde. Except for the Tupolev Tu-144, which actually was quite like Concorde, and it came first, so technically Concorde was like the Tu-144. They were like each other. I'll start again.
Depending on your outlook Concorde was either the best airliner ever or a classic example of hubris, shortsightedness, the sunk-cost fallacy, the law of diminishing returns, lust, envy, not sloth. It was a four-engined, long-haul airliner with seating for around one hundred passengers in a 2+2 arrangement. Despite being aimed an exclusive market of business fliers and the wealthy, Concorde's inflight entertainment consisted entirely of a large display showing the aircraft's Mach number and altitude. And perhaps people-watching. There were no films, no seat-back screens, no onboard phones. Passengers had to stoop to navigate the cabin and the seats were more cramped than those on a modern-day premium economy flight.
But Concorde was fast. It flew higher and faster than any other airliner. An unusual consequence of the aircraft's speed meant that BA001, the scheduled flight from London to New York, took off at 10:30 GMT in London and landed at JFK Airport in New York an hour earlier, at 09:25 EST. No other airliner came close.
At a cruising altitude of 60,000 feet Concorde could maintain a speed of just over 1,300mph, twice the speed of sound, more than twice as fast as any other airliner in transatlantic service. There are apocryphal tales of Concorde's passengers sipping champagne while looking down at Boeing 747s as Concorde overtook them.
Concorde was developed in the 1960s and early 1970s by the British Aircraft Corporation, with help from our French friends at Aérospatiale. We let them design some of the unimportant components, such as the wings and the hydraulics and the control systems and the navigation equipment, minor stuff. We built the important parts, including the engines, and the name, and Brian Trubshaw, who was the chief test pilot and very, very British.
In the late 1950s the aviation industries of Britain and France independently came up with supersonic airliner concepts, but in a spirit of entente cordiale that's French and also a desire to save money it was decided that Concorde should be a joint Anglo-French project. The deal was signed by the governments of Harold MacMillan and Charles De Gaulle, who were both worried that their nations were lagging behind the United States, not just technologically but in terms of global power. They saw a future in which people flew around the world in American airliners while eating American food, and they were horrified. Furthermore Britain was haunted by the enormous what-if of the DeHavilland Comet, a potential world-beater laid low by a string of tragic crashes.
The French had the concept of short-ranged supersonic airliner that would have mostly flown pan-European routes. The British design was larger, and optimised for the longer-range transatlantic market, which turned out to be the right call. Britain has always looked across the ocean to the United States and the rest of the world, which is why Britain is Great Britain, and France is just "France" or "La France", but not "Great France", or "Plus Grand France".
As a gesture of goodwill we agreed to call the aircraft Concorde, with an e on the end, but not La Concorde because there are limits. On a political level Concorde was incredibly lucky. During its development Britain switched from Conservative to Labour to Conservative to Labour governments, but each of them had different reasons to support the aircraft. Harold MacMillan wanted to retain Britain's seat at the top table; Harold Wilson's government was keen on the white heat of technology; Edward Heath was all-in for Europe; and by the time Harold Wilson came to power again in the mid-1970s it was too late to back down, even though it was apparent that Concorde was never going to pay back its development costs.
In the late 1950s jet-powered aviation was still new and expensive. There was a widespread assumption that jet travel would continue to be expensive, and that supersonic travel would be the next big thing, but as development of Concorde proceeded it became apparent that both of those ideas were wrong. Supersonic airflow is inherently high-drag, which meant that Concorde would always have a higher price-per-passenger-mile than its subsonic competition. Furthermore the aircraft's inflexibility made it unusually sensitive to the price of oil, and its complicated systems meant that only a small number of airlines could afford to operate it.
Meanwhile, in the United States, Lockheed and Boeing also came up with designs for supersonic airliners, but the two companies were unable to make the numbers work, and the US government was considerably less interested in the idea. There's a narrative in the UK that the United States failed to develop a supersonic airliner because they did not have our genius, and out of spite they went on to sabotage Concorde's commercial prospects, but that's not true.
In the mid-1960s the US government conducted a series of tests over the continental US to find out whether sonic booms would damage infrastructure on the ground. The government flew B-58 bombers over Oklahoma and measured the results. The damage was less severe than anticipated, but the tests coincided with the dawn of the environmental movement. The key problem with the US SST was that, for it to make commercial sense, it had to fly domestic routes over the continental US landmass, which became impossible in the face of public opposition to sonic booms. US government funding was cut in 1971, but the US SST programme was already dead by that point.
Concorde's first prototype took to the air in 1969, with its first transatlantic flight following in 1973. It eventually entered commercial service in 1976, with BA flying London-Bahrain, and then London-Washington, and Air France flying Paris-Rio, with a fuel stop in Dakar. Despite the stopover the Paris-Rio route took only seven hours, versus eleven and a half nowadays. One destination that initially played hard to get was New York, where the mayor refused to give the aircraft a flight permit. That was apparently a New York thing rather than a United States thing, and so in 1977 the US government told New York to knock it off. From that point onwards New York became the most popular destination for both BA and Air France, with daily flights from Paris and London.
The Soviet Union also developed a supersonic airliner, the Tu-144, which was slightly larger and slightly faster than Concorde. It entered service in 1975, but it was never fully debugged and only conducted a few dozen commercial flights before being mothballed. It was a clever design in some respects - it used canard foreplanes to reduce the landing speed, which allowed it to use a wider range of runways than Concorde - but the entire concept was antithetical to the Soviet viewpoint and so it ended up as a prestigious publicity stunt.
The Tu-144 had one other thing in common with Concorde. They were both flying adverts for an economic system, but whereas the Tu-144 did nothing to make Communism look attractive the Concorde was aspirational. Never mind the waste. The average man and woman in the street liked Concorde and dreamed of flying it some day. On the ground, with the nose drooping down, it was a futuristic swan. In the air it was a gleaming paper dart. The only people who disliked Concorde were unattractive Trotskyites, which was ironic given that Tony Benn was one of the aircraft's biggest fans. And also economists, and airlines. They disliked it as well. Yes, technically Concorde was an awful advert for capitalism, but come on. Isn't that the thing about capitalism? It's horrible, but it's sexy. That is the world we live in.
On a purely pragmatic level Concorde wasn't a great success. Its afterburning turbojets were extremely inefficient at subsonic speeds. Concorde regularly flew non-stop from London to New York, but it could never have flown from New York to Los Angeles. On paper the subsonic range of circa 3,200 miles could have covered that distance, but the need to carry extra fuel in case of poor weather or an airport emergency would have necessitated a fuel stop, which would have defeated the point of a high-speed airliner. That, combined with generally high engine noise, put paid to any attempts to sell it to the US domestic market. The hot and high conditions in many airports in sub-saharan Africa meant that Concorde flights to that continent were intermittent, again requiring refuelling stops.
The shorter journey times were attractive, but there were only so many multimillionaires and corporate CEOs who absolutely needed to cross the Atlantic in three hours, and neither BA nor Air France attempted to run more than one transatlantic flight per day, which might have made the economics more favourable. Putting on my businessperson's hat, it strikes me that an eight-hour flight with a large folding table where I could do some work, or even catch up on sleep, would have been more attractive than three hours sitting in a cramped seat trying to read Bright Lights, Big City. And although Concorde's heyday predated the modern internet, by the 1990s it competed with fax machines and email, which nullified Concorde's speed advantage entirely. Ultimately there were only twenty Concordes, seven for British Airways, seven for Air France, two prototypes, and two test hacks.
Throughout its commercial life seat prices on Concorde varied widely, ranging from from £5000-13000 or so for a transatlantic flight depending on the deal. Towards the end of service prices dipped as low as £4000 one-way, and it was common for passengers to book a one-way ticket across the Atlantic on Concorde with a return on another airliner. Air France and British Airways both ran their aircraft with a single seat class unique to Concorde, with special Concorde-only lounges at Heathrow and Charles De Gaulle. Heathrow's Concorde lounge still exists, complete with a Concorde nosecone as a floor display.
Concorde's two main operators were British Airways and Air France, but a couple of other airlines briefly used the aircraft. From 1979-1980 Braniff Airways of the United States offered a service whereby passengers were flown at subsonic speeds on a Braniff-operated Concorde from Dallas, Texas, to Washington DC, at which point a British Airways or Air France crew took over and ferried the passengers on to London. The flight from Dallas to Washington was limited to Mach 0.95, although there are rumours that pilots accidentally broke the sound barrier while over unpopulated areas. Publicity drawings show the aircraft painted in orange Braniff livery, but apparently in real life it retained its original paintwork.
The internet gives various figures for the percentage of seats that had to be sold for a Concorde flight to make a profit, anything from 30-50%, but presumably Braniff's subsonic leg would have required even more passengers than that, and in the end no other US carrier operated the airliner.
In 1977, and from 1979-1980, British Airways and Singapore Airlines don't get those two mixed up came to a deal whereby the two airlines jointly operated a Concorde from London, to Bahrain, and on to Singapore. It was painted with Singapore Airlines livery on the left side. The arrangement did not run smoothly. The two companies had considerable difficulty persuading the governments of Indonesia and Malaysia to allow Concorde to overfly their territory, and the route had to take a circuitous approach from Bahrain to Singapore, swinging out into the Arabian sea, avoiding India and Sri Lanka. Despite a one-hour stop in Bahrain for fuel the total flight time was just over nine hours, which compares with non-stop flight times of around thirteen hours nowadays, but the thought of sitting in one of Concorde's cramped seats for nine hours sounds like torture.
One Concorde was built for Iran Air, who placed an order in 1972. The Iranian Revolution put paid to that, and the order was formally cancelled in 1980, at which point the airframe was sold to British Airways. Londoners of a certain vintage might remember Iran Air's offices in Piccadilly, just opposite The Ritz, which for a long time had a model of an Iran Air Concorde in the window. Sadly the Google Street View car arrived too late to capture it:
Concorde made a small profit for both BA and Air France, but this was only because the governments of Britain and France had written off the development costs and sold the aircraft to the airlines at far below their market value. Even then the margins were thin, nowhere near enough to fund a second generation of Concorde or even to upgrade or replace elements of the existing airframes.
There were tentative plans to enlarge the wing, increase the fuel tankage, and update the engines, all of which came to nothing. As the airframes rolled off the production line minor changes were implemented, but Concorde was never stretched or re-engined. By the 2000s the analogue cockpit was out of date, and it was the last aircraft in BA service with a dedicated flight engineer.
Incidentally the flight engineer had to shift the aircraft's fuel back and forth to ensure that it was correctly trimmed for level flight. In the event of an in-flight engine failure the engineer also had the unenviable job of trying to restart an afterburning turbojet at supersonic speeds, which can't have been easy.
Concorde had one fatal accident, in July 2000. During take-off an Air France Concorde bound from Paris to New York overran some runway debris, which bounced up into the fuselage and punctured one of the fuel tanks. The fuel ignited, and in the resulting crash all 109 people aboard the aircraft were killed, along with four people on the ground. Concorde was grounded immediately.
After reinforcing the tyres and fuel tanks BA and Air France conducted a series of test flights, culminating a final acceptance flight that took off at 10:30 GMT on the morning of 11 September 2001. It was in the air as the 9/11 attacks took place, and by the time it landed commercial aviation had been suspended in North America. BA and Air France continued to offer flights until 2003, but Concorde was doomed. Over the course of its last years passenger loads increased dramatically, because "if not now, when". As of this writing the remaining airframes are museum pieces that will never fly again.
In the years since Concorde's retirement there have been several attempts to market supersonic airliners and business jets, but none of the companies involved have managed to make the economics work. The fastest commercial aircraft flying today are sub-orbital rocket planes designed to give a handful of paying passengers a taste of spaceflight.
On a cultural level the Concorde is in an odd place. The internet is largely written by Americans, but they did not dream of Concorde when they were young. Americans hate to lose. As far as the internet is concerned Concorde is a peculiar oddity from the distant past. In particular the angry middle-aged American men of Airliners.net absolutely hate it, because we beat them! Harold MacMillan and Charles De Gaulle beat them. At that one, narrow thing, we beat them. As far as they are concerned Concorde was a awful deathtrap, but we beat you, just this once, and you hate us for it. Which is understandable, because we really did beat you.
And that's Concorde. A heck of a thing. On the subject of commercial disasters and next episode of "every etc" will cover Convair and Dassault, who made aircraft that repeated many of Concorde's mistakes. In fact Dassault made an airliner that was even less popular than Concorde, which took some doing.
