The loss of Concorde very quickly began to emerge as one of the great mysteries. British Aerospace and Rolls Royce engineers dismissed out of hand the possibility of the fuel leaking and igniting. The security dragnet that surrounds all Concorde flights dismissed as absurd any possibility of anyone planting a bomb on board.
Indeed there have been only two comparable air disasters in recent years. The first was USAIR’s Flight 427 from Chicago to Pittsburgh in 1994—when the Boeing 737 plunged 6,000 feet and nose-dived into a ravine at 300 mph killing all 132 passengers and crew.
The black box explained nothing, and no one has ever offered a satisfactory reason for the crash.
The second, of course, was TWA’s Flight 800, an aging Boeing 747 that burst into flames and plunged into the Atlantic off Long Island in July of 1996. There are still those who swear the aircraft was hit by a guided missile. Particularly three commercial airline pilots who reported seeing at least one missile in the air while flying over the same New York airspace where Flight 800 exploded.
The pilots, from Northwest, Delta, and US Airways, were all headed westward over the city toward Philadelphia, and they reported their missile sightings separately.
The U.S. Navy replied that they might have sighted two D5 Trident missiles being fired at the time from a submarine, USS West Virginia, off Florida, the night being very clear. However, those missiles were being launched toward the Azores, and the launch platform was close to 2,000 miles away. It was not terribly likely that all three of the commercial pilots would have made such a colossal error of distance judgment, especially since they were all flying the wrong way to see the Trident missiles anyway.
Pierre Salinger, JFK’s former press secretary, was convinced the U.S. Navy shot down Flight 800 by accident, with a missile which somehow got away. He went so far as to call a press conference in Paris to present his findings four months after the crash. But none of it ever came to anything.
The only truth was that no one had ever explained conclusively what happened to USAIR’s 437 at the bottom of the ravine, nor what had befallen TWA’s 800 off Long Island.
By the afternoon of January 19, Concorde 001 had joined that select pair of great modern aviation mysteries. No one was able to offer one single clue as to what had brought down the MACH-2 thunderbolt that flies alone on the frontiers of space.
What everyone required was Concorde’s two black boxes, one of which was the Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) the other the Digital Flight Data Recorder (DFDR). But the aircraft had gone down in such diabolically deep water, possibly almost 3 miles, right on the far northwestern edge of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, it might prove impossible to retrieve anything off the bottom.
The British would no doubt bring to bear the most modern sonar systems and diving machines, and the Americans would no doubt find a way to assist. But it should be remembered that the finest feat of recovery ever, for black boxes, took place in February 1996, when a Turkish-based Boeing 757 from the Dominican Republic plunged into the Caribbean killing all 189 people on board.
On that occasion, four or five nations jointly financed a contract for the U.S. Navy to dive to more than 7,000 feet. On the first day they discovered that the black boxes were still emitting signals from their underwater locator beacons, which led the divers immediately to them. To this day, airline investigators still discuss that operation with awe.
But it had been carried out in warm water, in bright conditions — a far, far cry from the black depths of the rough, storm-tossed North Atlantic in January, where Concorde’s black boxes might also still be emitting signals, but from an ocean floor more than twice as deep as the one in the Caribbean that claimed the757.
The media’s problem in covering the news story was that there appeared to be no one to blame. Certainly not the pilot, nor his crew, who were dead, and had been flying Concorde for years. Certainly not the Shannon Air Traffic Control operators, who had already said good-bye to Flight 001. And certainly not Air Traffic Control, Gander, who were 1,600 miles away, and reported no unusual weather conditions for any flight, all day, particularly for one flying 4 miles above the weather, where the wind rarely rises above 40 knots.
The tough, hard-eyed security chief on duty in Concorde’s area at Heathrow made a bomb inquiry from a female reporter from London’s Channel Four look ridiculous. He gruffly informed her that if she cared to put an unauthorized suitcase anywhere near Speedbird 001’s loading bay, she would probably be torn to pieces by guard dogs, and if not, then shot on sight. He was only half joking.
201100JAN06. 43N, 38.25W. Depth 100 meters.
Course 120. Speed 5.
HMS Unseen was running silently, and deep, the commanding officer sipping Turkish coffee in the control center, in conference with his navigation officer, Lt. Commander Arash Rajavi.
“I think we were correct, Arash. It was wise to clear the datum and make nine knots away from the firing area for a day. Now I think we are also correct to continue at five knots. At this depth and speed we are completely safe from detection. But tonight we shall have to snorkel for a few hours…batteries getting low. I just don’t want to come up before dark.”
“Nossir. I think not. The Americans are very vigilant around here. They have big a surveillance station at Halifax, as you know. That SOSUS very dangerous to us. If we stay dead slow, they hear nothing, right?”
“That is correct, Arash…but we’ll have to snorkel by 1800.”
“Then where, sir? Where do we go afterward? Can I know our next mission?”
“We will stay on the westerly edge of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge for the next twelve days. Detection is nearly impossible there. That way we can be back in our old position on 30 West, at the fiftieth parallel in perfect time.”
“We fire again, sir?”
“Yes, Arash. We fire again.”
Day after day they cruised quietly, snorkeling for very short periods by night, but always keeping the batteries well charged, just in case Unseen should need to get away from a pursuing U.S. or British warship. It was impossible for Commander Adnam to know whether or not the military had yet been called in to assist with the investigation into the crash of Concorde, but he knew they would come in the end.
He sensed that inside the U.S. military he had a very determined opponent. Someone who, he had no doubt, would one day piece together that one maestro had sunk a carrier and downed a supersonic jet. Both times using a submarine. Ben Adnam had no illusions about his own cleverness, but he was equally certain there was at least one person, just as cunning and just as brilliant, operating on the Great Satan’s side of the fence. It was that sort of assumption that kept him alive, he reckoned.
They stayed silent in the deep water, occasionally monitoring the satellite for news or orders from Bandar Abbas. And the Iranian crew awaited patiently the next instruction from their Iraqi captain.
For eight days he revealed nothing. They all knew that the next mission would be essentially the same as the first, but on January 26, Unseen received a terse signal: “PR campaign launched.” And Adnam briefed his crew on what this meant.
Then, two mornings later on January 28, a highly exclusive photograph appeared in the international Iranian daily newspaper Kayhan, which is the much more hard-line English-language edition of the Tehran Times… designed for an overseas readership.
The picture showed up, in color, over four columns, at the top of page five. And it showed two Army trucks, full of heavily armed Iraqi soldiers, driving through the streets of the little marshland town of Qal At Salih, east of the Tigris, some 30 miles from the Iranian border. Behind one of the trucks was a trailer on which was some kind of a rounded cargo, covered with a tarpaulin.
The caption beneath it said:
IRAQI ARMY PERSONNEL ON THE MOVE NEAR OUR FRONTIER. FEARS OF MAJOR GARRISON BUILDING AT QAL AT SALIH.
Beneath the picture, the italicized credit line read:
AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE.
Now, none of this was parti
cularly interesting. It was deep in the background of the photograph, slightly hidden beyond the trucks, where the writing was apparently on the wall. In daubed Arabic lettering was the slogan, DEATH TO THE OIL THIEVES. Beneath it was the unmistakable pterodactyl outline of Concorde coming in to land, nose angled down.
The photograph would have been perfectly complete without it, and indeed it really required a magnifying glass to make out the exact message of the lettering. But in Paris that morning there was someone with a magnifying glass, Ross Andrews, the CIA’s chief field officer in France. And he was staring at the picture on page five of Kayham with profound interest.
He called the veteran picture editor at Agence France, and wondered if he could purchase a copy that might be clearer. Such requests from American Embassy staff officers were not unusual, and Franc Gardu said he would call back when he located the negative.
Unhappily he could find no trace of the picture, not in the printing rooms, not in the wire room. Uneasy about calling back the U.S. Embassy and admitting he had no idea where the picture was, he placed a call to the offices of the Tehran Times.
Franc had spoken to the picture editor there many times, especially during the various Middle Eastern conflicts of the past thirty years, and now he queried: “Are you certain you got that picture from us?”
“Of course I’m sure. It came in by wire yesterday morning. I just signed the credit to your account. It’s a nice shot.”
“Does it have our stamp on it, top left?”
“Wait please…I’ll check…absolutely. It’s right there.”
“You wouldn’t be good enough to wire us back a copy would you? I can’t find the negs.”
“Sure…be happy to.”
And with that, Karim Meta wired a copy of a perfectly exquisite forgery to Paris, a forgery so beautifully worked that no one except a military scientist would ever be able to tell that the trucks, and the soldiers, and the trailer, had been superimposed onto a photograph of a painted wall in a back street of south Tehran.
That morning Franc Gardu received several other requests for the photograph, one from the Kuwait Times. By the evening, midday in Washington, there were two wired copies of the picture on the desk of the CIA’s Middle East Chief Jeff Austin. One from Paris, one from the field officer in Kuwait.
Each one was accompanied by a similar memorandum, remarking how odd it was that a few remote people, from deep in the land of the Marsh Arabs in southeastern Iraq, had reason to be cheered by the loss of the U.S. oil-negotiating team that had died on Concorde. “No secret about the deaths, every paper in the Middle East carried the story. Here in Kuwait City there was even an interview with Mohammed Al-Sabah about his friend Bob Trueman…just seemed a bit strange that there should have been people who were pleased the Americans had died, right down there in the marshes.”
Jeff Austin’s mind buzzed. It was the second time he had seen that name Qal At Salih in the last six months. The first time had been back in the summer, when there had been two mild alerts about Iraqi missile testing in the marshes, though nothing had come of it.
And now this. Cheers from the Marsh Arabs about Concorde’s crash and the Americans who died in it. Jeff Austin called Admiral Morgan in the White House on the secure line and recounted his thoughts. The national security advisor was very reflective.
“How’d we get the picture?” he asked.
“Apparently with some difficulty. Two of our guys spotted it in the Tehran paper, and then had to negotiate with the French picture agency to buy it. I’m sending a copy over to you right away…you’ll see…it’s not that easy to read the graffiti right away. It’s in Arabic. It’s the picture that grabs you…the one of the aircraft. I thought both of our guys were pretty sharp to notice it. Ross Andrews in the Paris embassy was first.”
“Uh-huh…yup, Jeff. I’d like to see it. By the way…did we get any more confirmation on that missile-testing business we discussed before?”
“Not a word, sir. Not another word.”
“Qal At Salih…that’s a goddamned funny place to be associated with world atrocities. Fucking Marsh Arabs splashing around with guided missiles hidden up their goddamned djellabas.”
6
February 2006.
The loss of the thirty-year-old Concorde, the sixth of the production models that had arrived onstream between 1976 and 1980, occurred at a poignantly significant moment for the aircraft industry. Because, at that very time, Concorde’s natural successor was undergoing its final trials out on the West Coast of America. It was the Boeing Starstriker, the last word in supersonic flight in the opinion of its designers…twice the size of Concorde, with three times the passenger capacity, and 350 mph faster across the ocean. But, more than that, it heralded the reclaiming of the high aviation ground by the U.S.A., after thirty-five years of European domination.
Those thirty-five years had never been easy for the American plane makers to accept. Way back in the early sixties, when President Kennedy had been determined the U.S.A. would lead the way in the production of SSTs, Boeing had been at the very forefront of the design developments. The great swing-wing Boeing 2707-100, built to fly at MACH-2.5 with 300 passengers, had seemed set to blow the Anglo-French Concorde right out of the game, just as the Boeing 707 had outcommercialized Vickers’s beautiful, quiet VC10.
But then had come the fashionable clamor for a cleaner, quieter, less polluted world. And America’s East Coast liberals waged a six-year campaign to have the supersonic transports killed off, as “too costly, too noisy, too threatening to the environment, totally unacceptable to anyone living anywhere near the airports of New York and Washington.”
With JFK gone, men like Senator William Proxmire rallied support for the cause that the U.S. government ought not to be funding it. There were Harvard scientists founding outfits like Citizens League Against the Sonic Boom. All over the country a rising hysteria grew ever stronger. The East Coast press printed every outlandish claim, that the great sound-barrier boom of the SSTs would obliterate houses, destroy the American wilderness, wipe out entire species of life on this planet: birds, insects, domestic pets, possibly even liberals.
By the mid-sixties, it was clear that Concorde was in front of the Boeing 2707-100 in its development, but most experts believed the great SST from Seattle would come in late, with a more realistic economic base, and take over the world’s most expensive passenger flights without much trouble. Poor little Concorde would be stampeded aside in the rush.
However the more pressing stampede was that of the abolitionists, and by the late sixties the tide had turned. Pan American and TWA, the two U.S. airlines that had been vociferous supporters of supersonic transport, canceled their orders for Concorde, and a shiver of apprehension was felt in Seattle.
And there was no help from the military, which had traditionally stood behind major aircraft development. In the old days, of the early fifties, any new American SST program would have been for the development of some huge Air Force-manned bomber, and money would have been made available from the defense budget. However, that game, too, was changing drastically, and big manned bombers were becoming obsolete in the new age of guided missiles.
Which left the Boeing Corporation in Seattle to fight a lone battle for its supersonic passenger jet, an aircraft totally impractical without government funding, an aerial wagon around which the Indians were already circling.
On the night of May 17, 1971, Congress finally finished it, voting 49–47 to discontinue funding the project. The men from Seattle were devastated. And three years later, they could only watch helplessly when a cheering crowd estimated at 250,000 surrounded Los Angeles Airport to witness the spectacular landing of Concorde prototype 02, as it came howling out of the skies on its triumphant American Pacific Coast tour to sell the concept of supersonic flight.
There were many designers, engineers, and test pilots at Boeing who never quite got over the political killing of the 2707-100, an aircraft equally as dramati
c as Concorde, and probably many times more financially efficient. One of them was a twenty-eight-year-old design engineer named John Mulcahy, an ex — Boston College football star, with an engineering doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
On February 2, in the deep winter of the year 2006, the sixty-three-year-old John Mulcahy was president of the Boeing Corporation, and he sat at the head of the long table in the rarefied corporate conference room listening with unashamed satisfaction to the latest reports of the tests on Starstriker. This was indeed the aircraft to dominate the world in the field of high-speed business travel, transatlantic, transpacific, global. Concorde had proved conclusively there was a market for executives who need to move across the world in a big hurry, the hell with the expense. And the giant Boeing SST was ready to place the corporation right back in the driving seat of world aviation. Where, John Mulcahy fervently believed, it had always belonged.
Certainly, in the intervening years since Concorde had first taken flight, the Boeing Corporation had dominated the world of commercial aviation, the Boeing 707s, 727s, 737s, 747s and the rest had been unrivaled in their volume, their safety and efficiency. But Concorde, nothing like so commercially successful, and a financial failure on so many routes, remained the glittering flagship of air travel.
She was the capricious high-speed record holder of the airways, the passenger jet everyone loved to watch. She had always been to aviation what the Cowboys were to football, what the Yankees were to baseball, what Arnold Palmer was to golf, what the Princess of Wales was to fashion. Concorde was the supersonic jet everyone wanted to meet, preferably from a window seat, sipping champagne, transatlantic.
Which made many Boeing execs consider the world a cruel and unfair place. Because they had designed an SST just as glamorous, even more spectacular-looking, and considerably faster. And government officials, more than three thousand miles away—American government officials — had destroyed her.
H.M.S. Unseen am-3 Page 17