Tempus fugit, of course, but it’s still hard for some of us to
realize that the giddy age of supersonic air travel has already
come and gone. And a damned good thing, too.
It was in fact just 41 years ago that André Turcat, a
47-year-old test pilot by trade, lined up a spindly, droop-nosed
flying machine on the center line of runway 33 at France’s Toulouse
Blagnac airfield. He spooled up its four puissant Olympus engines
to a cosmic roar, switched on after-burners, and released the
brakes. As Concorde Prototype 001 took off in its patriotic blue,
white, and red livery, excited onlookers were chanting Allez
France! Allez France!
No matter that those engines were mostly British, as was roughly
half the plane. When Turcat landed 35 minutes later on March 2,
1969, it was clear that France had a proud new symbol. As Le Monde
has frankly noted, Concorde “was created largely to serve the
prestige of France…[it was] the expression of political will,
founded on a certain idea of national grandeur.”
Now a months-long trial in Paris illustrates how specious the
whole business was. Not to mention potentially more dangerous to
your health than smoking. It shows, for those who hadn’t already
surmised as much, that Concorde was a preposterously expensive
accident waiting to happen. The people responsible for perpetrating
this sham are not in the courtroom, of course.
Concorde’s end came not with a whimper but a tragic bang at 4:44
p.m. local time on July 25, 2000. Air France flight 4590, chartered
by a group of 100 Germans heading for a rendezvous with a cruise
ship in New York, blew a tire on its left landing gear as it
accelerated down runway 26 at Charles de Gaulle airport. Debris
slung from the tire and wheel hit the underside of the plane’s left
wing and penetrated a fuel tank.
President Jacques Chirac, just landed from Tokyo, watched aghast
from his taxiing 747 as the Concorde’s leaking jet fuel caught
fire, trailing a long sheet of flame. The plane lost power in its
two left engines. Past the point where takeoff could be aborted, it
struggled barely 200 feet into the air as the cockpit crew tried
desperately to turn toward nearby Le Bourget airport for an
emergency landing. “Too late…no time,” were Captain Christian
Marty’s last recorded words as the uncontrollable plane suddenly
flipped over and pancaked onto a mostly empty building in the Paris
suburb of Gonesse. All 100 passengers, three flight crew, six
flight attendants, and four persons on the ground were killed.
France went into mourning. The crash was compared to the sinking
of the Titanic, the Hindenburg bursting into
flames, the Challenger space shuttle exploding. Tinkering
was done afterward on several Concordes, reinforcing fuel tanks and
strengthening tires, but the plane made its final commercial flight
in October 2003. Even London’s understated Times lamented,
“Nothing will ever be quite the same again…This was the
superplane, the symbol of progress, the icon of invention, a
totem.”
And yet. Despite the glamorous image, Concorde was a hard-luck,
jinxed project from the beginning, a cautionary tale about doing
something just because it was technically possible and politically
attractive.
THE ROOT OF THE PROBLEM was that Concorde was entirely a
public-sector project and ipso facto out of touch with reality. In
the 1960s the French and British governments spent $3 billion in
public monies developing a supersonic transport (SST). (U.S. plane
makers Boeing, Lockheed, and North American also caught the SST
fever and did designs, but market realities made them abandon the
idea in the early 1970s.) Besides the intense, politically popular
satisfaction of beating the Americans at the game of air transport
they had dominated for so long, this kept British and French
state-owned aircraft manufacturers busy. And when it was built, the
reasoning went, they could always sell it to their subsidized
national airlines.
Their engineers used some 300 test models in wind tunnels and
gave birth to a weird breed of bird. Lift was provided by a
combination of wing, vortex, and thrust. Its all-important center
of gravity was moved forward or aft by manually transferring fuel
among its 14 tanks. At Mach 2, about 1,150 knots, and 60,000 feet,
the air temperature is around minus 67 degrees F, but atmospheric
friction heated the fuselage so much it expanded to make the plane
about half a foot longer. “It’s not an easy plane to fly, you have
to be constantly alert,” Peter Duffey, a retired British Airways
Concorde pilot, once told me. “Takeoff time is only half that of a
747. At twice the speed of sound, you’re always thinking about
where you can land in the event of an emergency, and there are
about 50 reasons besides engine failure why you would have to take
it down to subsonic flight.”
Sales estimates were for 240 Concordes by 1978; optimists hoped
for up to 1,500 purchases eventually by the world’s airlines. But
then the same reality hit that had discouraged American designers:
nobody wanted to buy what the French invariably called the
beautiful white bird. Grandeur and prestige alone won’t keep
shareholders happy, and commercial airlines couldn’t see how to
make money with it.
First there was the oil shock of the 1970s, driving fuel prices
up — and Concorde consumed four times as much fuel to carry
one-quarter as many passengers as a 747. Besides that, engineers
and marketers greatly underestimated the problem of the sonic boom.
Resembling the dis-concerting crack of a high-velocity rifle shot,
it would be heard by millions on the ground as the plane passed
overhead. That ruled out lucrative American routes like New York to
Los Angeles. And Concorde’s thunderous engines made so much noise
on takeoff that some major cities were unwilling to accept it.
Finally all prospective buyers canceled their options except the
captive Air France and British Airways, which got the plane at
bargain prices from their governments. Only 14 Concordes entered
service. To be sure, it became an instant hit with the fashionably
hurried, who lined up to pay about $10,000 for a round-trip
transatlantic ticket to race the sun, leaving London or Paris for
New York and arriving about three and a half hours later — a few
minutes before they left. But personally, I found the one trip I
made an unpleasant experience: sealed in a narrow tube with windows
about the size of a man’s hand, passengers could barely converse
with their seatmates for the deafening engine noise. Compared with
the quiet, palatial luxury of first class in a 747, it was a chore
to gain a few hours.
“The economics of Concorde never made sense and there was never
a market for it,” Ronald Davies, curator of air transport at
Washington’s National Air and Space Museum, once told me. “For
every hour in the air, it spent 14 on the ground. And for every
seat transported across the Atlantic, it had to carry one ton of
fuel. It was so inefficient it’s unbelievable.” And all that money
spent on the development of this prestige project? “Taxpayer-funded
executive air transport. It’s one of the biggest scams ever
perpetrated.”
BUT THE PERPETRATORS aren’t on trial in Paris. Instead, it’s
Continental Airlines and two of its maintenance men, accused of
manslaughter along with two hapless retired French former employees
of the company that originally built Concorde and a former member
of the French civil aviation authority.
Continental is the ideal scapegoat. Besides the offense, in
French eyes, of being foreign, a small titanium strip fallen from a
Continental plane taking off before the Concorde was found on the
runway. This, French investigators — often loyal former employees
of Air France — conveniently concluded, slashed the Concorde’s
tire and caused the accident. Case closed, with victims’ families
already paid generous financial settlements and sworn to
silence.
That overlooks a few awkward things pointed out by Continental’s
lawyers and a dogged investigative reporter for a French TV
channel. Like the plane being overloaded with baggage. Like a wheel
spacer that, due to an Air France maintenance error, was missing
from the left main gear, leaving it skewed. (Air France itself,
whose careless maintenance was noted even by French investigators,
is bumptiously suing Continental in the trial. Malicious gossips
wonder why it’s not a defendant instead.) Like testimony by a
number of reliable eyewitnesses, including airport firemen and the
veteran captain of Jacques Chirac’s taxiing plane, that the
Concorde caught fire several hundred yards before it could have
struck the titanium strip.
But the most damning argument against Concorde is its record of
near disasters. “French civil aviation authorities should have
stopped Concorde service years ago,” argues Olivier Metzner,
Continental’s lead lawyer. “They wanted to protect the image of
France it projected.” If the Paris disaster was Concorde’s first
and only fatal crash, facts emerging in the current trial make
clear that many passengers are lucky to be alive today: from 1976
to 2000 they unwittingly survived no fewer than 57 tire-related
incidents. Thirty-two blowouts damaged the aircraft’s structure,
engines, or hydraulics, and six resulted in penetration of one or
more fuel tanks.
The worst, uncannily like the Paris crash, occurred in
Washington on June 14, 1979. Air France Flight 054 to Paris blew
two tires on its left main gear on takeoff from Dulles airport,
hurling rubber and wheel rim debris at the left wing and engines.
After a frantic passenger practically forced a crew member to look
through his window at a 12-square-foot hole in the wing, the flight
crew barely managed a landing at Dulles with Jet A-1 fuel spewing
from a dozen holes in fuel tanks, engine damage, severed electrical
cables, and loss of two out of three hydraulic systems.
The near-catastrophes continued. James B. King, chairman of the
National Transportation Safety Board, wrote to his French
counterpart on November 9, 1981, expressing his “serious concern”
about “the repetitive nature of these incidents.” Besides the tire
problems, Concordes occasionally lost parts of their elevators and
rudders in flight. In 1998 the Federal Aviation Agency, noting “an
unsafe condition” might exist on the Olympus engines that could
result in shutdown or fire, ordered special inspections. As the
resulting study warned presciently, “A major technical event would
probably end Concorde operation.”
That event occurred 10 years ago this July. It ended not only
the Concorde myth and the lives of more than 100 trusting people,
but France’s brief, costly moment of supersonic grandeur.
