Concorde is the last relic of an aviation era, when money was no object and glamour was king, writes Gerry Byrne
Next October marks the end of an era when the world's fastest airliner stops flying, paradoxically because it is too old fashioned. Old fashioned because the era of travel based on rigid class lines is collapsing, and old fashioned because its technology has been leapfrogged several times over.
And it's also dying because the era of governments telling airlines how to run their businesses is also drawing to a close.
Despite flying higher and faster than any other airliner, the remaining Concordes will probably go into museums because they are expensive, elderly and inefficient white elephants for which the economics never came right.
Although Richard Branson has said he would like to add them to his Virgin empire, the chances are he'll back off when he gets a chance to look at the accounts for the Concorde fleet. The only reason they are still flying today is because a select group of very wealthy people were prepared to pay about €4,000 each way to fly the Atlantic at twice the speed of sound. And what a trip.
London to New York dining on champagne and lobster in just three hours and 20 minutes while rubbing shoulders with the likes of Sting, David Frost, Paul McCartney, Cliff Richards, Mick Jagger, Elton John, even Queen Elizabeth. And rub shoulders is exactly what you did in its cramped narrow fuselage.
Now, fear of terrorist action during the latest Gulf War, together with SARS, the deadly new pneumonic plague is scaring people from travelling. And although British Airways and Air France, the only two airlines ever to have operated Concorde, are not saying so, widely broadcast news film of a doomed Air France Concorde with orange flames bursting from its punctured fuel tank shortly before crashing outside Paris killing all aboard in July 2000 dealt Concorde a psychological blow from which it probably never fully recovered.
A grocer whose canned beans aren't selling can leave them on the shelf and they'll sell tomorrow, or the next day. Empty airline seats are a different matter; you can't sell them tomorrow when the aircraft has to fly today. That's bad enough on a Ryanair 737, but an entirely different matter when they are the most expensive airline seats aboard the most costly airliner in the world.
The French word 'concorde' implies agreement and harmony and it was chosen for the aircraft by the Paris and London governments when they got together in the early 1960s to plan their response to growing American successes in commercial aviation.
Although Britain had produced the Comet, the first jet-powered airliner, and France and Britain had scored early successes in short-haul jets with the Caravelle and BAC1-11 respectively, the Americans had stunned the world with the Boeing 707, the first coast-to-coast jetliner which could easily reach Paris from New York.
Concorde was to produce the world's first supersonic jetliner and regain Europe's aviation lead but the project was far from harmonic. In a typical display of Gallic pride the French insisted on all the design drawings being produced in French and they also demanded that all components for the aircraft be built either in Britain or France, even when cheaper parts could be bought off-the-shelf from America. While the French measured in millimetres, the British worked in sixteenths of an inch.
British motives were even more complex. Apart from wanting to give their aircraft industry a badly needed boost, the British wanted to suck up to the French who were opposing UK entry into the Common Market. British suspicion of French motives poisoned relationships so much that at one stage the British Government side insisted on dropping the "e" in Concorde to produce a more English sounding name.
When Britain's penny-pinching new Labour government wanted to axe the project in 1964 the French threatened to sue using a clause which, ironically, the British had insisted upon to prevent the French wriggling out if the going got tough. The cost of the project had doubled to £500 million by 1966 and the prototype was still not built.
Ironically, the only glue which held the project together was a fear that the Americans would produce a faster aircraft and, after several US airlines signed options to buy the still unbuilt Concorde, Washington stepped in with heavy subsidies to airlines which would buy the supersonic alternative being planned by Boeing, an aircraft they were told would fly at Mach 3, three times the speed of sound.
The first Concorde was wheeled out of a Toulouse factory in 1967 but it took another five years before the manufacturers were ready to start nailing down the 74 provisional orders they had received out of a total of 250 they hoped to sell. But other nails were being hammered into Concorde, coffin nails.
The environmental lobby in the US campaigned vociferously against Concorde: they said a fleet of supersonic aircraft sonic-booming through US skies would leave polluted air as well as a trail of smashed windows and ringing eardrums in its wake. When a beleaguered Capitol Hill finally pulled the plug on supersonic subsidies, effectively killing Boeing's project, all the American airlines who had booked Concorde cancelled their orders.
Without the US market, Concorde was doomed and it later had a struggle gaining agreement from the New York authorities allowing it land there, even at slower, sub-sonic speeds. In a matter of days, Concorde went from being a superb symbol of Anglo-French co-operation, to being one of the worst ideas anyone ever dreamed of. Air France and British Airways also tried to wriggle out of their orders of a total of nine aircraft which were only secured when the British and French governments agreed to write open-ended cheques to subsidise their supersonic operations.
Concorde properly entered service in 1976, more than 13 years after it was first conceived and almost immediately attracted a cult following among the rich and famous to whom the notion of paying enormous amounts of money to barrel through the sky in a giant fighter aircraft held enormous appeal.
But Concorde had been conceived in an era when fuel was cheap. In the meantime OPEC had pushed up prices and Concorde's inefficient engines burnt fuel like it was still the 1960s. The development of better, more fuel efficient engines came too late for Concorde.
But another nail was about to be driven into Concorde's coffin. In 1987 part of the roof flew off an elderly Hawaiian Boeing 737 and in 1996 another elderly airliner, this time a Boeing 747, blew up off the coast of New York. It led to the creation of an international task force to examine the maintenance of ageing aircraft, a task force which decreed that the definition of elderly in aviation terms was just 14 years.
In the meantime, there had been the July 2000 Paris accident when debris thrown up from a punctured tyre holed a fuel tank on take-off and started a fire which caused the Air France Concorde to crash. Both governments grounded the aircrafts to protect against a similar accident recurring.
The airliner did not fly for another 15 months but it next took to the air almost on the eve of the ageing aircraft task force decision. By this stage Concorde was twice the official age for an ageing aircraft and British Airways, which had been represented on the task force, and Air France faced huge maintenance bills just to ensure safety.
The Gulf War and SARS drove the final nails into Concorde's coffin and brought a heavenly dream crashing down to earth.
Gerry Byrne is an aviation journalist