Somewhere over the Atlantic, the purser would point to the cabin display as it ticked from Mach 1.99 to 2.00, and champagne glasses would rise at close to 60,000 feet — high enough to see the curvature of the Earth against a sky turning indigo. Flying west, Concorde outpaced the planet's spin: leave London mid-morning and you landed in New York, by local clocks, earlier than the hour you had left. For twenty-seven years this was not a stunt but a scheduled service, with a departure board and a cheese trolley.
The aircraft was born of a treaty, not a business plan. In November 1962 Britain and France signed an agreement to build a supersonic airliner together — famously without a break clause, which kept both governments locked in as the costs multiplied several times over. The British Aircraft Corporation and Sud Aviation, later Aérospatiale, split the work, and the two nations even squabbled over the name: France spelt Concorde with an "e", Britain dropped it, and the minister Tony Benn restored it, declaring that the "e" stood for excellence, England, Europe and entente — adding, when an indignant Scot pointed out that much of the aircraft was built in Scotland, that it also stood for Écosse. The prototype first flew from Toulouse on 2 March 1969 with André Turcat at the controls. The Soviet Tu-144 — inevitably nicknamed Concordski — had beaten it into the air by two months, but crashed at the 1973 Paris Air Show and never became a true rival.
Engineering at Mach 2
Cruising at Mach 2.04, roughly 2,180 kilometres per hour, posed problems no airliner had faced. The slender delta wing that made supersonic cruise efficient forced a nose-high landing attitude from which pilots could see no runway at all, so the designers hinged the entire nose — the famous droop snoot, lowered for take-off and landing, raised behind a visor for cruise. Air friction heated the skin to around 127°C at the nose, and the warmth stretched the airframe by as much as 25 centimetres in flight; a gap opened beside the flight engineer's panel at speed, and on the fleet's final flights crews famously wedged their caps into it, to be gripped forever as the metal cooled. Trim was managed not with drag-inducing control surfaces but with the fuel itself: as the centre of lift slid rearwards through the sound barrier, pumps shifted tonnes of fuel between tanks to move the centre of gravity to match. Four Rolls-Royce/Snecma Olympus 593 turbojets, lit with afterburners for take-off and the push through Mach 1, supplied the thrust — and a departure roar that airport neighbours never learned to love.
Commercial service began with choreographed simultaneity on 21 January 1976: a British Airways Concorde left London for Bahrain at the same moment an Air France Concorde left Paris for Rio de Janeiro. The prize transatlantic routes followed once American objections subsided — Washington in 1976, New York in late 1977. Carrying about 100 passengers, Concorde crossed from New York to London in around three and a half hours, less than half the subsonic time; the record, set in February 1996, stands at 2 hours 52 minutes and 59 seconds.
The arithmetic that failed
The order book had once promised a fleet for the world's great airlines, Pan Am included, with options for more than 70 aircraft. Then the world changed. Regulators banned supersonic flight over land — the sonic boom saw to that — confining Concorde to ocean routes, and the 1973 oil crisis made a fabulously thirsty aircraft look like a liability. Every option was cancelled. Just 20 Concordes were built, prototypes included, and only the two national carriers ever flew them commercially, acquiring the aircraft at token prices while taxpayers absorbed development costs that had swollen into the billions. British Airways, given a free hand in the 1980s, discovered that passengers assumed tickets cost even more than they did, priced accordingly, and ran Concorde as a profitable luxury for two decades. The end came quickly. On 25 July 2000, Air France flight 4590 ran over a titanium strip shed by another aircraft on the runway at Paris; a tyre exploded, debris ruptured a fuel tank, and 113 people died — the type's only fatal accident. Traffic slumped after September 2001, maintenance costs climbed, and both airlines retired their fleets in 2003, the last British Airways passenger flight landing at Heathrow on 24 October. No airliner since has carried passengers faster than sound. Concorde retired as that rarest of machines — obsolete and unsurpassed at the same time.
Quiz nuggets
- Concorde first flew on 2 March 1969 from Toulouse; commercial service began on 21 January 1976, with British Airways flying to Bahrain and Air France to Rio.
- It cruised at Mach 2.04 at up to 60,000 feet, and heating stretched the airframe by up to about 25 centimetres in flight.
- The droop nose gave pilots a runway view; supersonic trim was managed by pumping fuel between tanks to shift the centre of gravity.
- Only 20 were built; the sole fatal crash was Air France flight 4590 on 25 July 2000, which killed 113 people.
- The fastest New York–London crossing, set in February 1996, took 2 hours 52 minutes 59 seconds.