Freed from deadlines, Küchemann’s team picked up their old work on the theory of high-speed flight and built a series of test aircraft to study the problem of wing design. They were by now expert at swept-back triangular wing layouts called delta wings. (From below, the Avro Vulcans were virtually perfect triangles.) Delta wings had a surface area that could keep them in the air at normal speeds; pushed beyond the speed of sound, their swept-back shape kept them within the cone of the shock wave. The main problems were takeoff and landing. The takeoff and landing angles with wings like these were incredibly sharp.
At the same time, veterans of the TSR-2 project saw a way to save some of their hard work, by adapting their warplane designs to create a viable civilian aircraft. The stage was set for a remarkable meeting of minds—and a remarkable new aircraft. In 1961, Peter Thorneycroft, then minister of aviation, spoke to the cabinet. His excitement was palpable. He was proposing that the government develop a supersonic passenger jet. With it, Thorneycroft believed, “Britain has an opportunity . . . of gaining the leadership we so narrowly missed with the Comet.”
At BAC, Archibald Russell—a notorious perfectionist—led the effort to create a British supersonic passenger plane. What he came up with would carry about 100 passengers across the Atlantic at around twice the speed of sound (or Mach 2, a term that remembers the German physicist Ernst Mach, who did so much important early work on shock waves). The Bristol 223 boasted four Olympus engines, based on those originally developed for the Vulcan, a curiously scooped delta wing shape, courtesy of Dietrich Küchemann, and a “droop nose” and retractable visor that allowed the pilot to see the runway on final approach, as the delta wing meant that the plane approached at a high angle of attack.
The 223 was an extraordinary technical advance—and it would cost an absolute fortune. In November 1962, a treaty between Britain and France split the bill by merging Russell’s project with a smaller supersonic project developed by Sud Aviation (later amalgamated into Aérospatiale).
When I say that the Concorde was a remarkable plane, I am not for a second forgetting its limitations. It lacked range, which lost it lucrative routes to the West Coast of the United States and Johannesburg. It carried only 100 people. And it wasn’t very comfortable: whoever dreamed up its plank-narrow seating certainly never predicted today’s ever-expanding waistlines. The legroom on offer wasn’t much better than you’d have gotten in economy class; and God help a tall person who tried to stand upright in the thing. BA made an effort, bless them, with their doll’s-house Wedgwood crockery and stunted silverware, but the Concorde was never going to be a comfort option.
At its maximum cruising height of 60,000 feet, the air is so thin that a sudden loss of pressure might well have knocked everyone out before they could get to their oxygen masks. The Concorde’s windows were made annoyingly small, in an attempt to keep the air in for longer, giving passengers those vital extra seconds. The plane flew so high, there was a dial in the cockpit recording the amount of ionizing radiation hitting it from space.
The Concorde flew faster than the earth spun; flying from east to west across the Atlantic, you could beat the clock and land before you arrived. It flew so fast, a commercial jet flying in the same direction would look to the Concorde’s passengers as though it were flying backward. Air compressed by the plane’s passage heated the windows in the cockpit so much, they became too hot to touch. The whole aircraft swelled in the heat of its supersonic passage, and a gap opened up on the flight deck between the flight engineer’s console and the bulkhead. Retiring flight engineers used to place their hats in the gap before it cooled; the caps are there to this day.
Still the world’s most futuristic-looking plane: a prototype Concorde draws the crowds.
The Concorde was a plane to capture the imagination of an entire industry—always assuming, of course, that the industry had any imagination. It turned out to be a big assumption.
The Anglo-French consortium that built the plane secured 100 nonbinding orders, but a series of near-fatal coincidences took the wind out of their sails. It was bad enough that the Concorde should go on sale at the height of the 1973 oil crisis; what really prompted those initial orders (from the likes of Pan Am, United, Lufthansa—all the major global players of the day) was the dreadful and spectacular crash of somebody else’s plane.
Some people say that the Soviet Tupolev Tu-144—the world’s first supersonic passenger jet, beating the Concorde to the grid by two months—was the product of industrial sabotage: a mere Concorde rip-off. That’s unfair. Yes, the Soviet designers had probably caught wind of the Concorde project. But the main reason the Tu-144 looked like the Concorde—even down to its droopable nose—was that the technology of the day would allow you to build only one sort of supersonic passenger jet. Like its rival, the Tu-144 was a well-configured plane, much less fuel-efficient than its Anglo-French relation, but bigger and significantly faster.
The Tu-144—instantly christened the “Concordski” in the West—was unveiled at the Paris Le Bourget air show on June 3, 1973. While in the air, it dipped violently, broke up, and crashed, destroying 15 houses and killing all six people on board and eight more on the ground.
The accident has never been fully explained. Tu-144s flew without trouble within the Soviet Union for years afterward. Rumors still circulate: of a near-collision with a French chase plane; of a fatal souping-up of the Tupolev’s automatic systems by a ground crew determined that it should outperform the Concorde; of a deliberate flaw introduced into Concorde blueprints known to be studied by Soviet spies . . .
The much-maligned Tu-144: the world’s first supersonic passenger plane.
In any event, the Tu-144 was done for commercially; and the Concorde, because it bore an obvious resemblance to the Tu-144, suffered by association. In the end, only Air France and British Airways took up their orders. Not that they paid for their planes: in the case of BA, the cost of buying the aircraft was eventually covered by a state loan, to be paid off by signing 80 percent of the plane’s operating profit back to the government.
The environmental movement was just getting going around this time, and one of its first targets was the noise pollution from aircraft. The Concorde was particularly vulnerable, because whenever it exceeded the speed of sound, a little of the air it displaced would explode. Over the years, aircraft designers have worked out ways to minimize this sonic boom, but at the time, it was popularly supposed that the sound barrier was some sort of real physical barrier that these newfangled supersonic aircraft simply had to punch through. No wonder some feared the future the Concorde was ushering in—a cacophonous new world, its skies atremble with booms and bangs and the ever more raucous drones of ever more powerful engines! Noise abatement was a serious issue whose time had come, but it’s a pity that the Concorde should have been made a target. It was far from being the loudest plane in the sky—a point well made in the U.S. Supreme Court in 1977, when the ban on the Concorde imposed by New York’s Port Authority was finally thrown out. (It was noted that the long list of planes noisier than the Concorde included the U.S. president’s own Air Force One!)
The biggest brakes on the Concorde’s future turned out to be the operators themselves. The Concorde—the airplane that wanted to be a rocket plane—was a proposition so futuristic, so controversial, so odd, neither company quite knew what to do with it. They both made the same mistake. They treated the Concorde like a regular passenger jet, only they stuck it on a pedestal: flying the Concorde across the Atlantic was business as usual, they said, except that it was exclusive, it was expensive, it was . . . well, unaffordable.
In the last six months of the Concorde’s life, BA woke up. Someone there finally realized why people flew the Concorde. And it wasn’t for the silver service, which in such cramped conditions didn’t mean anything anyway. People flew the Concorde for the experience. It wasn’t the workhorse the designers had imagined and the airlines had wanted. It was something quite different: a plea
sure craft.
BA finally started thinking creatively. If you simply loved the plane, you could take a pleasure trip, taking off and landing at Heathrow. Or you could fly out on the Concorde and catch a regular economy flight back again. For lovers of speed, BA offered discounted fares. Lo and behold, they were no longer hurling empty seats over the Atlantic at twice the speed of sound. And according to a report in the Sunday Times, they were earning a whopping profit, too: £50 million ($83 million) in six months!
On July 25, 2000, during takeoff from Gonesse, France, Air France Flight 4590 rolled over a strip of titanium—part of a thrust reverser that had, only minutes before, fallen from a Continental Airlines DC-10. This fragment punctured a tire on the Concorde’s left wheel assembly. The tire exploded, hitting the fuel tank and snapping an electrical cable. The tank fractured, and fuel spilled out over the sparking wire. A fire broke out, and the landing gear refused to retract. Unable to gain height or speed, the plane pitched up violently, then rocketed into the Hotelissimo Hotel, killing all 100 passengers, 9 crew, and 4 people on the ground.
It was the Concorde’s only fatal accident, and it did not stop it from flying, but it did make abandoning the aircraft easier.
In fact, the ax had already fallen. Demand for air travel slumped following the attacks of September 11, damaging an industry already injured by rocketing fuel costs. The first-class cabins of flag-carrier airlines were even emptier than usual. BA and Air France committed themselves to withdrawing the Concorde from service so they could fill up their empty first-class seats.
It was while the Concorde was grounded following the Gonesse crash that BA and Air France noticed something interesting: regular users of their supersonic service were buying first-class seats on their regular jets, and they seemed to be staying loyal to the companies that operated them. Finally it was clear: if BA and Air France killed the Concorde, they would not just save money on maintenance; they would make their other long-haul flights more profitable. They wouldn’t even lose any passengers, because there were more than enough empty seats in their first-and business-class cabins to accommodate the demand from former Concorde flyers. It made a brutal sort of sense, and times for the airline industry were hard in 2003.
I offered to buy British Airways’ Concorde fleet for the same amount BA had paid for it. By my calculations, that was about £1 a plane. When new, the Concordes had been valued at around £26 million each, but the government’s loan had meant that BA had never had to hand over any real money. Later, a newly privatized BA bought two aircraft for a book value of £1 each as part of their £16.5 million buyout in 1983.
For some reason, BA was unmoved by this logic! So I made the company another offer: five planes at £1 million a plane. Again BA would not budge. It was only by killing the Concorde that they could hope to fill their first-class cabins. Flights by a Virgin Atlantic Concorde would only empty them again. I didn’t like BA’s attitude, but I could understand it. What baffled me far more was why the British government had never had the sense to insist that they could give the plane to somebody else if BA decided not to operate it. After all, it was the taxpayers’ plane, not BA’s!
By this time all sorts of special-interest groups—including members of BA’s own staff—were lobbying to keep at least one Concorde in service for special occasions. Every royal birthday, we can still muster a Vulcan, a Lancaster, a handful of Spitfires—so why not Britain’s most instantly recognizable civilian plane?
So I pledged £1 million to the idea of a heritage trust, to maintain a couple of Concordes for the nation. The Farnborough-based company QinetiQ was willing to maintain the aircraft, and the former Bristol Aeroplane Company—now the U.K. aerospace giant BAE Systems—said that its factory at Filton, in Bristol, could house the planes. What a magnificent homecoming that would have been, since Filton was the very place the Concordes were designed and built! It might have happened—if I’d only had British Airways to deal with. I was coming up with all sorts of ideas; at one point I suggested we paint one side of the plane in BA colors, the other side in Virgin’s livery! BA’s responses were guarded, but we had hopes of bringing it around.
The trouble was France. The Concorde’s one fatal crash had occurred on French soil. Many had died, and a nation had mourned. When the time came for Air France to wrap up its Concorde service, the French people were quite prepared to accept that the Concorde was unreliable, outdated, and done for. Now, here were a bunch of English aviation enthusiasts, convinced that the Concorde was still a brilliant plane and prepared to maintain a Concorde in operational condition on English soil! If this went ahead, then Air France and the French government would be perceived as having unfairly abandoned one of France’s great technical achievements.
I offered to buy British Airways’ Concorde fleet for the same amount BA had paid for it. By my calculations, that was about
£1 a plane.
Neither the company nor the government relished such a major embarrassment. Even as I was receiving positive messages from the European airplane manufacturer Airbus, who had the contract to maintain the planes, another group of Airbus top brass declared that they absolutely would not, under any circumstances, maintain the plane. Airbus, I should mention, is based in Toulouse, France.
So that was that. BA and Air France transported their fleets to museums, where today they languish on “static display.” Britain’s best-loved plane will never fly again.
Critics claim that the Concorde was a white elephant: expensive to develop (which it certainly was), expensive to maintain (true, but exaggerated), and expensive to operate (absolute nonsense). The Concorde was a sports car. You don’t buy a sports car for its fuel economy. So what if a 747 is four and a half times more fuel-efficient than a Concorde? A fully booked 747 is more fuel-efficient than a family sedan! Playing with numbers is easy. The point is to ask what these vehicles are for, and to operate them responsibly.
The Concorde wasn’t what either its designers or its operators expected. In thrilling crews and passengers and lookers-on, it served to introduce us to a new model of the air industry: a way of doing things that took the “long” out of long-haul flying.
Entertainment leads us into the future. Novelty and fun, more than anything else—more even than the ambitions and fears of nations—are the engines that carry us there. The Concorde was never going to usher in a world of Concordes, any more than the Delahayes and Bugattis of the 1930s were going to usher in a world crawling with race cars. The challenge today, for those of us inspired by the Concorde’s example, is to create supersonic passenger planes that are faster, cheaper, and kinder to the environment.
The Concorde was made out of the most advanced materials of its day, most of them metals. Its descendants will be woven out of resins. The Concorde burned fossil fuel by the barrel-load; its children will burn engineered fuels that have a minimal effect on the environment. The Concorde climbed as high as it could, then slogged its way through the air; its offspring will escape the earth’s atmosphere entirely, increasing their speed and saving the atmosphere from harm. The Concorde cut the journey times of its competitors by more than half; tomorrow’s planes will carry passengers from New York to Sydney in less than two hours. Concorde promised a future in which all parts of the earth were accessible, convenient, and local. I believe that the technology being developed by Virgin Galactic will make good on the Concorde’s promise. I don’t know whether this will happen in my lifetime, but successors to the Concorde are already being developed.
Ordinary jets can’t go faster than Mach 3 without their turbine blades melting. Rocket ships can reach Mach 25, traveling fast enough to reach earth orbit; but they have to carry tremendous amounts of liquid oxygen to burn their fuel. Perched somewhere between the conventional jet and the conventional rocket is an idea of an engine so simple, so unconventional, and so damnably hard to do, only a handful of such engines have ever been made.
Aside from the pump that injects the fuel into the
engine, the ramjet has no moving parts: no turbines, no fans, and no axles. Its shape alone compresses the air entering it as the plane moves forward. Its only glitch is that it works only at high speed.
The ramjet was invented in 1913 by French inventor René Lorin. Though his design made sense—and was granted a patent—Lorin couldn’t find materials adequate to build a prototype. Another paper ramjet, this time by Hungarian inventor Albert Fonó, went even further: in 1932 a patent was granted to a design meant to power a high-altitude supersonic plane!
The world’s first ramjet-powered airplane was Soviet, and it followed only seven years later, but since then, the ramjet has found few applications in anything other than the most exotic military craft. This is largely because a plane that requires two kinds of propulsion—one to bring it up to the speed at which the other can begin to work—makes for an expensive project!
Ramjets, which become efficient only above Mach 1, have an upper speed limit, too. This is because the air in the engine has to be slowed to subsonic speeds before the fuel in the engine will ignite. Slowing down the air makes the engine unbelievably hot. It doesn’t matter what you do to cool it: above Mach 5, a ramjet will disintegrate.
Enter the scramjet: a supersonic combustion ramjet. Because it accelerates the fuel being injected into the engine to supersonic speeds, the scramjet doesn’t need to slow down the air coming into the engine. The good news is that the scramjet can fly above Mach 5 and operate comfortably 46 miles above the earth, where it can’t do any damage to the earth’s atmosphere. The bad news is that if the speed of the air in the engine falls below Mach 1, the engine chokes and the whole thing blows up.
The U.S. National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) lights some blue touchpaper.
NACA’s X-Plane projects—we’ll come to them in the next chapter—already include experimental scramjets, and, if Alan Bond has his way, Europe will not be far behind.
Reach for the Skies Page 17