Concorde: A Retrospect

On this date in 2003 the last flight by a British Airways Concorde carrying paying passengers flew in to Heathrow. Hundreds of Thousands of people made sure that they could see - and hear - this spectacular aircraft for a last time. There were a few more final flourishes, including one in which half a dozen of the 'planes flew up the Thames estuary towards the airport; then that unique sound vanished from the skies. A few of the aircraft have been kept as museum pieces, but they are naturally regarded as relics rather than as harbingers of great things to come.

The aircraft were first mooted in the nineteen fifties, and a joint venture was sealed with France; long before Britain was admitted to the Common Market that was to mutate into the European Union. Harold Wilson's Labour government strongly considered aborting the project, on cost grounds; but it was decided that this joint exercise with France, that would put Europe ahead of the USA and the USSR, was too important to abandon. Tony Benn, in a short episode of ministerial office, returned from conversations in Paris to report that the project would definitely go ahead: and that the name of the craft would be spelt in the French way - with an e on the end - to stand for Europe, enterprise and a whole string of other e-words that I cannot remember [and it is not worth looking them up].

To fly in Concorde was a very special experience. It was all-first-class [except on specially booked flights] and the space in the cabin was extremely limited. There were four carefully-designed small seats in each row, with a relatively narrow aisle and a low ceiling. Takeoff was spectacular and the craft quickly got to supersonic speed, which was shown on an indicator at the front of the cabin. The westbound journey to New York took almost four hours: which meant that the 'plane arrived in America a little earlier [on the clock] than its takeoff time from London. I was intrigued to find that a lot of people booked westbound flights on Concorde to enjoy the experience of 'beating time'; then they traveled eastbound on less cramped aircraft.

Some people became inter-continental commuters - a few, mostly media figures, on a weekly basis - and claimed to feel no ill-effects from the experience.

The venture was demonstrated soon to be uneconomic. It became a flag-flying exercise for British Airways, Air France and their sponsoring governments. There were no orders from alien airlines, and while the USA and USSR developed and even tested supersonic passenger jets there was no marketed competitor to Concorde.

The context in which this happened was that of the cold war. With the development of nuclear weapons, the competing powers of NATO and the Warsaw Pact needed aircraft that could deliver such weapons with minimum chance of being intercepted before they got over their target. The development of fast fighter 'planes reduced the chances of even supersonic bombers being successful; so began the concentration on inter-continental ballistic missiles. The British and French governments decided jointly to try to create a market for supersonic aircraft in commercial use: and Concorde was the spectacular result. But it was never cost effective. The amount of the most highly-refined fuel needed to get it [and keep it] airborne, in ratio to the number of passengers who could be carried, was never going to be economically efficient. Commercial aircraft constructors saw the future in large-bodied, relatively economical sub-sonic 'planes: of which the Boeing 747 and the European Airbus became the best-known workhorses.

Some of the technology that was developed for supersonic flights was of use generally in the aircraft industry: but that knowledge was mostly acquired from the bomber programmes; Concorde was not needed from that point of view.

As the small stock of planes aged, so maintenance costs increased, fuel efficiency declined and it became clear that passengers in general preferred the relative economy and comfort of wide-bodied aircraft in which first-class passengers could have beds, business class could have comfortable divans, and everybody had space to move around. The British and the French had proved what could be done. Tens of thousands of people had enjoyed the unique experience. But that was that.

Was it sad? Not particularly. It was they way of the world: 'how the cookie crumbles'.
Was it wasteful? Yes, but nobody much minded.
National pride was enhanced.
France was helped to develop the capability to build big, twenty-first century aircraft for which the Brits made some of the parts.
France can still design and build fighters: Britain has surrendered that capability.
The relative efficiency of the bureaucracies of the two states was sharply differentiated by the whole venture. The French remain focused, chauvinistic and effective. The British have remained indecisive and have continued to axe promising projects every time austerity is called. The British are probably the better engineers: but that fact is always eclipsed by political reality.