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Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
Not even a hideous crash -- and the worst single event in the history of the airline business -- could permanently ground the most sensual and timelessly attractive of airplanes. And by the way, you don't say "the" Concorde.
Feb 4, 2002 | "I felt about the Concorde as one might feel about a beautiful girl walking into class on the first day of school: I had to get close to her somehow, whether we actually hooked up or not." -- James Kaplan, "The Airport"
It had never crashed.
That was the most notable thing about Concorde, or at least the one statistic everybody seemed to know. And citing the plane's so-far perfect record was, maybe, a welcome distraction for the citizens of Britain and France, a comforting mantra in light of the more than $3 billion they contributed to development of the supersonic transport project, which began in 1962.
As it was, however, Concorde was no safer than any other airliner. This was, after all, a meticulously maintained ship that made, on average, only two flights a day, oceanic crossings along familiar routes to familiar airports. And by the time production ceased in 1979, 10 years after the prototype first took flight, only 20 Concordes had ever been built. (By comparison, Boeing has rolled more than 1,100 747s from its factory in Everett, Wash.) An accident-free résumé was more the work of probability than engineering. In fact, owing to characteristics well known to its pilots -- aerodynamic instabilities and a hard-to-tame nature -- one suspects a proportionately equal number of Concordes on the rosters of the world's carriers might have resulted in a different reputation altogether.
Although 16 airlines, including Pan Am and TWA, initially held options for Concorde deliveries -- some 74 in all -- most of these were canceled in the early 1970s, and nobody except the flag carriers of Britain and France ever came to own one. Airlines were reluctant to take on not only the jet's high operating costs, but also its propensity for spewing out noise and air pollution. Sign-carrying protesters often greeted Concorde arrivals. The Port Authority of New York, wary of Concorde's sonic booming and generally bad (i.e., loud) temperament, refused to grant it landing rights at John F. Kennedy International Airport, a ban that lasted until the U.S. Supreme Court struck it down in 1977.
Contrary to popular opinion, Concorde was not the only, or even the first, SST. (However pretentious it seems, you're not supposed to put "the" in front of its moniker, something only CNN's Christiane Amanpour, probably a frequent Concorde passenger, ever seems to get right on TV.) The Soviets beat the Anglo-French engineering team to the punch with the Tupolev Tu-144, a slightly larger Concorde look-alike that first flew on Dec. 31, 1968. The race to produce the world's first faster-than-sound passenger plane was rich with intrigue and danger, complete with the smuggling of Concorde specs into Russia hidden inside toothpaste tubes. Eager for glory but apparently not glamour, the Communists put their plane into revenue service on what we might call a "people's route" -- the run between Moscow and Alma-Ata, the capital of Kazakhstan.
Such egalitarian deployment was something Concorde would never see, despite its designers' dreams of a fleet of 400-plus planes in the hands of most of the world's biggest airlines. Concorde would find its place as an anachronistic holdout -- an Orient Express of the skies, a White Star Liner in a Carnival Cruise world of crowded terminals and overbooked charter flights -- and would stay there.
The Tupolev's career, punctuated by a disastrous crash at the 1973 Paris Air Show, was short. But Concorde, its delta-winged profile instantly recognizable, became an icon. It was elegant. Its haughtily graceful outline (and equally impressive fares) suggested refinement and privilege, just as the industry was avalanching into the chaos of deregulation. It was international, in a sexy, James Bond kind of way. The sleek superbird, with its hydraulically adjustable nose (for visibility during takeoffs and landings), was a kind of European emissary, an ambassador of aesthetic and technological triumph.
Aside from JFK and Dulles International Airport, just outside Washington, Concorde flew regularly to Mexico City, Bahrain, Barbados and Singapore. Air France flew it between Paris and Rio de Janeiro, calling at Dakar, Senegal, on the African coast for fuel before blasting off across the South Atlantic. And despite an unquenchable thirst for kerosene, its two operators -- British Airways and Air France -- claimed their machine was profitable.
