Concorde Read online

  CONCORDE

  By the same author

  Harrier

  Giants of Steam

  Spitfire: The Biography

  Nagaland: A Journey to India’s Forgotten Frontier

  Tornado: 21st Century Steam

  The Story of Architecture

  London: Bread and Circuses

  First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2015 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

  Copyright © Jonathan Glancey, 2015

  The moral right of Jonathan Glancey to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Hardback ISBN: 978-1-78239-107-4

  E-book ISBN: 978-1-78239-108-1

  Paperback ISBN: 978-1-78239-109-8

  Printed in Great Britain

  ENDPAPER IMAGE: Concorde’s final voyage, 24 October 2003

  (Bruno Vincent/Getty Images)

  Atlantic Books

  An Imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

  Ormond House

  26–27 Boswell Street

  London WC1N 3JZ

  www.atlantic-books.co.uk

  CONTENTS

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  INTRODUCTION

  1 HATCHING A SPEEDBIRD

  2 THE SOUND BARRIER

  3 CHASING THE DREAM

  4 THE RIVALS

  5 CLEARED FOR TAKE-OFF

  6 THE SERVICE RECORD

  7 UNPREMEDITATED ART

  8 PHOENIX RISING

  9 SUPERFAST FUTURES

  10 AN END TO ADVENTURE

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  Section One

  Miles M.52 (Courtesy of Philip Jarrett)

  Papier mâché and sticky tape models (SSPL/Getty Images)

  Handley Page design (Courtesy of Philip Jarrett)

  HP.115 (Courtesy of Philip Jarrett)

  BAC 221 (Courtesy of Philip Jarrett)

  Concorde 001 at the Paris Air Show, 1967 (Courtesy of Philip Jarrett)

  Concorde 001 on its first flight, 2 March 1969 (Courtesy of Philip Jarrett)

  Concorde 002 lands after its maiden flight, 9 April 1969 (SSPL/Getty Images)

  Andre Turcat and Brian Trubshaw (Courtesy of Philip Jarrett)

  Air France Concorde cockpit (Jean-Claude Deutsch/Paris Match via Getty Images)

  Concorde assembly at Aerospatiale, Toulouse (Courtesy of Philip Jarrett)

  Concorde with a Citroën DS (magiccarpics.com)

  Tu-144 prototype (Courtesy of Philip Jarrett)

  Boeing 2707-300 mock-up (Courtesy of Philip Jarrett)

  Concorde over Trafalgar Square (Central Press/Getty Images)

  Section Two

  Portrait of Sir Morien Morgan by John Ward (1976) (Courtesy of The Master, Fellows and Scholars of Downing College in the University of Cambridge)

  Concorde wind tunnel models (SSPL/Getty Images)

  Vortex pattern (Photo12/UIG via Getty Images)

  Concorde afterburners (© Reuters/Corbis)

  Concorde flying overhead (Allan Burney/Barcroft Media/Getty Images)

  Concorde G-BOAG salutes QE2 with Red Arrow Hawks (Adrian Meredith Photography)

  Concorde aircraft in formation (Adrian Meredith Photography)

  Concorde G-BOAA with Mk IIa Spitfire P7350 (Adrian Meredith Photography)

  Concorde’s mach-meter (Martyn Hayhow/AFP/Getty Images)

  Concorde G-BOAF flies over Clifton Suspension Bridge (Adrian Meredith Photography)

  Virgin Galactic’s White Knight Two (Frederic J. Brown/AFP/Getty Images)

  X-43A (Tom Tschida/Nasa Photo via Getty Images)

  Snow Goose (Delmas Lehman/Shutterstock)

  Concorde’s final flight (Adrian Dennis/AFP/Getty Images)

  ‘What man-made machine will ever achieve the complete perfection of even the goose’s wing?’

  Abbas Ibn Firnas, 852 AD

  ‘It’s a lovely shape – one feels that if God wanted aircraft to fly he would have meant them to be this shape.’

  Sir Morien Morgan, 1964

  ‘A very friendly boom, like a pair of gleeful handclaps.’

  Sir James Lighthill, 1971

  ‘I am pretty satisfied that the airlines do not want it and that the people of the world do not want it.’

  Jeremiah Dempsey, Aer Lingus, 1964

  INTRODUCTION

  ON a looming day of low cloud and swept snow in February 1969, test pilot Jack Waddell lifted a massive Boeing 747 into the air above Everett, Washington. The maiden flight of the Jumbo Jet lasted eighty-five minutes. The aircraft was, Waddell told waiting journalists on landing, ‘ridiculously easy to fly, a pilot’s dream . . .’

  The following month, on a dull and damp day in southern France, Concorde 001 reached for the clouds brooding over Toulouse. André Turcat had the dream job of piloting this pencil-thin machine, a supersonic rapier to Boeing’s subsonic broadsword. Keeping Concorde’s drooping nose-cone and stork-like undercarriage down throughout the twenty-seven-minute rite of passage, Turcat returned to tell a packed press conference, ‘Finally the big bird flies, and I can say . . . it flies pretty well.’

  These two first flights a few weeks apart were to change the way we fly and see the world forever. Boeing executives, who had staked their company’s future on the Jumbo Jet, had kept a weather eye on the development of the exquisite Anglo-French Concorde. At that moment, just months before NASA rocketed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the surface of the Moon and safely back to Earth, it looked as if supersonic was the way to go, with commercial space travel not so very far into the future. Only the year before, in 1968, cinema audiences had watched the luminous image of a remarkably convincing Pan American Space Clipper waltzing towards an orbiting space station, complete with a Hilton Hotel, in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Concorde was a small, if significant, step for civil aviation; soon enough, we would all be hurtling around the world, immaculately dressed and impeccably served, in luxurious aircraft even faster than Turcat’s ‘big bird’.

  Boeing imagined it could sell 400 747s as airliners before the market was saturated. It would then focus on production of freighter versions of the new jet. And, when the world’s leading airlines had bought fully into Concorde and the passenger Jumbo was made redundant, those first 400 747s could also be converted into freighters. In the event, some 1,500 747s had been built by mid-2014, with more to come. Air China took delivery of its first 747-8 Intercontinental in September 2014; this stretched version of the successful 747-400 can seat 467 passengers in a three-class configuration and fly 8,000 miles without stopping to refuel. In fact, in 2015 hundreds of 747s were in regular service and, given that an average Jumbo has a life of forty years – it can last for very many more – the latest versions could still be in service until the mid-2050s. Although no-one can predict with certainty just how long the Jumbo will ride the world’s airwaves – reports of its demise were rife in 2015 – it might just fly on until its centenary in 2065.

  Designed, built and tested at a spanking pace, the mighty aircraft made its first fare-paying flight, with Pan Am, from New York’s JFK to London’s Heathrow Airport on 22 January 1970. While the flight was delayed in and out of London by technical glitches, the Jumbo, wit
h its spacious cabins, stable ride and all the positive associations the Boeing name brought, was adopted wholeheartedly by airlines and passengers alike. Within a year of its launch, seventeen airlines were operating 747s and seven million people had flown on a Jumbo. Pan Am’s 1966 order alone, for twenty-five 747s, had been bigger than those for all Concorde aircraft.

  Concorde’s gestation had been slightly longer than that of the 747, which had been built on the shoulders of Boeing’s first jetliner, the elegant and supremely successful 707, first flown in 1958 and for many, then as now, an emblem of the Jet Age. Concorde was something altogether new. Its genesis can be dated officially to November 1956, when the Supersonic Transport Aircraft Committee (STAC) first met in London. Eight years later, Julian Amery, the British minister of aviation, and Geoffroy de Courcel, the French ambassador to the Court of St James’s, signed an Anglo-French treaty to develop and produce a ‘civil supersonic transport aircraft’. The first metal was cut in 1965, although it was to be another ten years before Air France took delivery of its first Concorde in December 1975, followed by British Airways in January 1976.

  By this time, however, Pan Am and TWA had decided not to take up options to buy Concorde, and other airlines that had seemed so keen on the supersonic airliner were also beginning to waver as the Oil Crisis hit business confidence, especially in the transport industries. Air France responded in 1974 with a headline-stealing transatlantic demonstration flight. On 17 June, the fourth Concorde built and the second pre-production aircraft took off from Boston’s Logan Airport for Paris Orly at the same time as the airline’s scheduled 0822 (Eastern Standard Time) 747 flight from Orly to Boston. Then sporting Air France livery on one side and British Airways on the other, F-WTSA passed high over the Boeing across the Atlantic. It spent sixty-eight minutes on the ground at Orly before heading back west to Boston, where it arrived eleven minutes ahead of the regular 747 flight.

  Politics and environmental concerns – some genuine, others spoilers – held Concorde flights to and from London and Paris and New York at bay until November 1977. This was the route Concorde was destined to fly, and it was essential for it to do so to pay its way – the aircraft’s limited range meant that, unlike the Jumbo, it was unable to fly non-stop across the Pacific. As it was, the 747 was still very much in production when scheduled Concorde flights came to an end on 24 October 2003. The last of three flights into Heathrow at 4 p.m. that day, BA002 from JFK, was flown by G-BOAG, one of the last of a grand total of twenty Concorde aircraft, of which just fourteen entered service, seven each with Air France and British Airways.

  Before that final flight left New York, pilot Mike Bannister gave passengers a crisp and moving pep talk. He told us that Concorde ‘could do things no other aircraft can do’, and that ‘We’re going to take you to the edge of space, where the sky gets darker, where you can see the curvature of the Earth. We’re going to travel across the Atlantic at twice the speed of sound, faster than a rifle bullet, twenty-three miles every minute. We’re going to travel so fast, we’re moving faster than the Earth rotates, and the world will be watching us.’ He also reminded his passengers that Concorde was the world’s only supersonic airliner.

  And therein lay the tragic nature of an otherwise sublime and magisterial aircraft: Concorde was one of a kind. For all the talk in those heady Space Age days of sensationally fast transglobal and even interplanetary flight, the Boeing 747 paved the earthly skyways for low-cost, mass-passenger flight. Just two months before Air France and British Airways began regular transatlantic Concorde flights, Laker Airways launched its budget Skytrain service from London Gatwick to New York with a clutch of wide-bodied McDonnell Douglas DC-10s. Fares were very low indeed. They helped to open up a new market of young and eager travellers for whom a champagne-and-caviar flight aboard a 100-seat skyrocket flying twice as fast and twice as high above them would be out of the question for many years and, possibly, for their entire lives. And at much the same time, it was easy enough to fly short-haul trips – London to Rome, for example – on legs of long-distance flights operated by Boeing 747s for precious little money. What fun it was as a student to fly Japan Air Lines on this very route when there were plenty of seats to fill on a 747 and to be treated like a young emperor and served delicious food in the company of polite and well-dressed passengers.

  In 2003, when 99 per cent of commercial flights were made in subsonic aircraft, a return trip across the Atlantic by Concorde cost a staggering £8,000. A first-class flight by 747 cost at least half of this. And, because there were just fourteen Concorde aircraft, they needed special attention, parts, labour and crews. The managements of both British Airways and Air France had increasingly, and unsurprisingly, come to see aircraft as coaches with wings, and built either by Boeing or the new interloper Airbus, and they had less and less time for an aircraft that was too individual by half. Indeed, the singularity of Concorde was underlined by the way in which people would point up from London streets as one of the supersonic jets, with the voice of Jove, descended over the city towards Heathrow and say, ‘Look, there’s Concorde,’ as if there was just one of these commanding aircraft, a lone eagle among gaggles of budget-airline geese. (Which is perhaps why, according to one of its most experienced pilots, the plural should never be ‘Concordes’ but always ‘Concorde aircraft’.)

  And yet, even if the odds had been stacked against Concorde – and there had been naysayers from the 1960s onwards – the aircraft itself was a soul-stirring achievement and a glorious design. The product of intense research and development, it was a mechanical and scientific marvel. It was also, quite simply, very beautiful indeed. The engineers who created Concorde gave us a machine that caught the imagination of artists, architects, writers, photographers and filmmakers worldwide and across several generations.

  It really was something to have shaped a machine that could fly so high and so fast for so long without it spilling a drop of passengers’ drinks. Concorde flew largely above turbulence while setting and smashing records. It treated runways like a fashion model parading aloofly along catwalks. It could outfly a jet fighter, cruising serenely at Mach 2 for oceanic spells. From 1976 to 2003, Concorde was civil aviation’s most compelling wonder. It has yet to be replaced.

  ONE

  HATCHING A SPEEDBIRD

  WHEN was Concorde conceived? The idea of supersonic airliners had been brewing for at least a decade in Britain, France, Germany, the United States and the Soviet Union before decisive action was taken in London on Monday, 1 October 1956. On that momentous day, Sir Cyril Musgrave, permanent secretary of the Ministry of Supply, chaired a meeting in Shell-Mex House, the imposing Art Deco building fronting the Strand and overlooking Westminster and the Thames. It was the most notable work of Ernest Joseph, a founding member of the Liberal Jewish Synagogue, an architect who had done much to find homes for Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany in the lead-up to the Second World War.

  It was the fight against Hitler that had seen the Ministry of Supply and the Ministry of Aviation move into this gloriously optimistic building in the 1940s. It was the fight against Hitler that had also, of course, all but bankrupted Britain, although not in terms of new ideas, new science, technology and highly advanced aircraft. Britain’s initial lead in the development and operation of jet airliners, however, had been scuppered following a sequence of disastrous accidents with the de Havilland Comet, the world’s first jet airliner. Flown as early as 1949, the Comet took the world of civil or commercial aviation by storm. It could fly considerably faster than the very best contemporary piston-engine airliners and turboprops, and it could fly much higher, above turbulence, and therefore far more smoothly than its rivals. It also looked like the future of long-distance passenger flight.

  Sadly, the Comet suffered three fatal crashes, due to structural fatigue, within two years of entering service with BOAC in May 1952. The Comet was grounded, not to fly again until 1958, when it worked the first scheduled transatlantic jetliner service
with BOAC. But this was also the year Boeing’s highly successful, and indeed epoch-making, 707 jetliner made its debut with Pan Am. The Comet’s transatlantic triumph was short-lived. The rival Douglas DC-8 entered service with United and Delta airlines the following year. Boeing was to build no fewer than 1,010 707s, and Douglas 556 DC-8s. The total number of Comets built, including prototypes, was just 114. As Sir Cyril Musgrave recalled, ‘All the major airlines were buying the 707 or the DC-8 and there was no point in developing another subsonic plane. We felt we had to go above the speed of sound, or leave it.’

  This was the gist of that October meeting in Shell-Mex House. It was attended by representatives of Britain’s leading aircraft manufacturers, its two state-owned airlines, BOAC and BEA, high-ranking civil servants from the Ministries of Transport and Civil Aviation and, crucially, by Morien Morgan, a deputy director of the Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE), Farnborough. Engineers and aerodynamicists at the RAE had been holding more or less formal meetings concerning commercial supersonic flight over the previous two years. In fact, the October meeting had been prompted by their concerns. Britain, a pioneer – the pioneer – of civil jet aviation, was being left behind by the Americans. In terms of economics, the future of its aircraft industry, the financial welfare of its airlines, and not least of national prestige, Britain needed to do something, and quickly. And the best thing it could do was to leap ahead of other nations by designing and building a new generation of Mach-2 airliners.

  This was thrilling stuff and, as far as Musgrave’s historic meeting in Shell-Mex House was concerned, entirely the right stuff. The meeting itself concluded with a decision to set up a Supersonic Transport Aircraft Committee (STAC) with Morien Morgan as chairman. Matters supersonic moved apace. The first meeting of STAC was held in the Ministry of Supply’s offices at St Giles Court, close to the junction of Oxford Street and Charing Cross Road, just over a month later, on Monday, 5 November 1956. This was Guy Fawkes or Fireworks Day, an appropriate moment perhaps to light the blue touch paper that would send the world’s first and, to date, only supersonic airliner rocketing into high and sustained Mach-2 flight. There was, though, much to do before that. Politicians of both main parties, along with aircraft manufacturers and airlines, had to work together. The aircraft that was to become Concorde would always require considerable direction and finance from the state. Private industry alone could never have brought the project, and the adventure, to fruition.